Hert2+ Breast Cancer Project

£100k partnership with The University of Manchester, The Manchester Breast Centre and Action Against Cancer, in a programme exploring HER2+ type breast cancer patients whose tumours are not responding to treatment.

Many patients diagnosed with breast cancer are given treatment to shrink a tumour as a first step, before surgery. Response directed therapy is the optimal approach for HER-2 positive breast cancer, allowing personalised medicine.

Primary medical therapy, formerly “neoadjuvant” therapy, whilst this is very helpful for some patients, unfortunately it does not work effectively in up to half of HER2+ breast cancer cases. This project aims to understand why this is, assess new drugs in lab models, and then with this knowledge design new clinical trials to test the effect of certain drugs with these patients to see what will work best.

The team of scientists plan to analyse residual tumour samples from HER2+ breast cancer patients to discover the “signalling pathways” that remain active and drive the cancer. This can be thought of as like a train travelling to its destination through a number of stations. At most of the stations the signalling technology works flawlessly and there are no problems. However, if one signal has a fault, the train can go on the wrong track leading to tragedy.

A signalling pathway is a series of chemical reactions in which a group of molecules in a cell work together to control an outcome, for example cell division or cell death. After the first molecule in the pathway receives a signal, it activates another molecule, and so on until the cell function is carried out. Abnormal activation of signalling pathways can lead to cancer, and conversely, drugs targeting specific molecules in the pathway may help keep cancer cells from growing.

This three-year research project aims to identify the faulty signals and to design new clinical trials across a cohort of patients.

For more information about this collaboration or if you would like to get involved please contact us at contactus@cancerservices.co.uk