Although October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a team of MSU researchers is acutely aware of it all year long.
Many MSU faculty and students dedicate their time to finding new treatments and preventative measures for breast cancer, and their findings could be impactful in the future.
Sandra Haslam, professor of physiology and director of the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Center is working with Richard Schwartz, professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, to find ways to prevent cancer by looking at the effects of diet during puberty
They’ve found that a diet high in animal fat during puberty can increase the risk of developing breast cancer.
“It doesn’t have to do with weight gain,” Haslam said. “Without an increase in body weight, we still saw an increase in breast cancer risk.”
Schwartz said there are many more people who eat high fat than gain weight, meaning this could apply to a large segment of the population.
“It may be wise for adolescent women to avoid such a diet,” he said.
The research started in 2002, but since 2010, the pair has worked to explain why this type of diet increases risk and how to best express their findings to the public.
“I feel very positive about focusing on prevention,” Haslam said. “As much as we try to improve therapy, we really need to move on to prevention.”
Treating resistant patients
Patients with estrogen receptor-positive, or ER, breast cancer tumors are treated with therapies that target the receptor, but they’re not effective for everyone. About 60-80 percent of breast cancer is ER positive.
Susan Conrad, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, has worked for about five years to find an alternative treatment for those people, she said.
“We are trying to identify treatments that work better and are less toxic and have a lower rate of resistance,” she said.
When a cancer patient with ER-positive tumors stops responding to hormone treatments, there are no good options for them besides chemotherapy, Conrad said. When people relapse and their tumors are ER-positive for a second time, the same treatments won’t work.
She said it’s difficult to know how long it would take for a new treatment to be approved for human use once it’s found.
Stopping the spread
The spread of breast cancer to other organs plays an integral role in survival rates: Of people whose cancer spreads, about 30 percent survive, whereas 90 percent survive if the cancer remains concentrated in one area. MSU researchers are working to find ways to stop the spread of cancer.
Daniel Hollern, a cell and molecular biology doctoral student, is studying E2s transcription factors, or E2s, which regulate gene expression. In his research, he found the gene expression changes controlled by E2s can promote the spread of cancer.
“If we can understand the mechanism, hopefully, there will be a target that we can use to treat breast cancer patients to block spreading and increase survival,” Hollern said.
He said he’s hopeful that he’ll find the mechanism in the next year. The next step will be finding or creating a drug to target it.
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Chotirat Rattanasinchai, a cell and molecular biology doctoral student, is working toward the same goal as Hollern, but in a different way. Her work is focused on the protein signaling network’s control of cancer cells’ ability to move throughout the body and whether disrupting the signal could prevent them from moving.
Rattanasinchai said the inhibitor she’s working with to disrupt the protein network signals could be developed as a treatment to prevent the spread of cancer cells in breast cancer and potentially other cancers.
