The National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, awarded researchers at the Montefiore Einstein Cancer Center a five-year $10 million grant to investigate the mechanisms regulating cancer cells that seed tumors in the lungs, where breast cancer metastasis often occurs.
Three grant-funded projects will study lung metastases due to triple-negative breast cancer. The first project will focus on the role of PI 3-kinases, a signal protein, in tumor metastasis. The second project will look at a subset of cancer cells with stem-cell-like properties and determine if non-cancerous cells may trigger their stemness and how. The third project will focus on stem-cell-like cancer cells that express high levels of MenalNV, an invasive variant of the protein Mena, which is linked to metastasis.
"Triple-negative breast cancer lacks the receptors that we can target when treating other types of breast cancer, which makes it a formidable challenge for patients and clinicians," Jonathan Backer, MD, professor of biochemistry, the William S. Lasdon chair in pharmacology at New York City-based Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the grant's principal investigator, said in the release. "Our findings from this study should help us understand the interactions between tumor and non-cancerous cells at metastatic sites and suggest strategies for treating metastatic breast cancer and, possibly, metastases caused by other cancers."