Pennsylvania Archives - Page 9 of 9

Kara Bernstein, Ph.D.

2014 V Foundation Wine Celebration

Volunteer Grant in Honor of John and Lily Kogan

Changes in the DNA, known as mutations, can arise during cancer and in some cases can also be a cause of cancer. For example, the RAD51 paralogues are proteins that are important for fixing broken DNA. Importantly, individuals with mutations in the RAD51 paralogues are more susceptible to getting cancer, particularly breast and ovarian cancers. The goal of our study is to understand why people who have mutations in the RAD51 paralogues are more likely to get cancer, and if we can, identify novel methods for treating their specific cancers. Our goal is to uncover individualized cancer treatment for these particular tumors so that these patients will have the best outcomes.

Jean Gatewood

Funded by Hooters of America, LLC

In an effort to better understand and meet the needs of women in the Hispanic community, Fox Chase Cancer Center is launching an initiative to learn more about their preferences regarding messages that inform and announce the availability of clinical trials for women with breast cancer.

Fox Chase will host a series of focus groups in order to seek guidance from the community on the impact of current announcements, gauge awareness of the availability of clinical trials options and understand how the messaging can be better enhanced in order to make the value of participation in research studies higher-impact.

We will host two focus groups of 10 women each. Focus group 1 will review the existing, Spanish-written brochure and will complete both pre- and post-user testing. Focus group 2 will review the verbal PSA version of the Spanish-written brochure and will also complete pre- and post-user testing. Using the information and feedback gathered from these focus groups, we will tailor our message moving forward to better increase knowledge about the existence, importance and education regarding the availability of clinical trials to minority women in North Philadelphia.

With a better understanding in place, we hope to see an increase in the number of diverse women joining breast cancer clinical research studies to better reflect the racial and ethnic mix of the clinical patient population.

Lewis Chodosh, M.D., Ph.D.

Despite improvements in treatment, breast cancers recur in some patients years after their initial treatment. Recurrent cancers arise from the small number of cancer cells that survive standard treatments, and ultimately resume growth. We have developed a way to find these cancer cells in mice and in patients, have identified how these cancer cells survive, and have found drugs that can kill them. In particular, we have found that treating mice with drugs that block a protein called “c-MET” can kill residual cancer cells and thereby prevent breast cancers from recurring.
Our goal is to now to determine whether we can use this approach in patients. To accomplish this, we will first study when c-MET gets “turned on” in cancer cells that survive treatment in patients. Second, we will treat mice bearing cancer cells with the anti-c-MET drug to determine if it will kill these cells and thereby prevent breast cancers from coming back. Third, based on these findings we will plan a clinical trial for women with breast cancer that will be able to determine whether anti-c-MET drugs can kill residual cancer cells and, ultimately, whether it can reduce recurrence and increase the likelihood of cure.