Breast Cancer Research

(I didn't edit this at all yet, so it's going to be a mite
hard to follow. I was tired when I wrote it)

Monday was a very long day at work. I didn't get home until after 11pm, largely due to a grant meeting that my boss wanted me to attend.

As it turned out, there was little reason for me to attend, and since it got out at 9:30pm, after most of the buses stopped running--I had a nice little hike in the rain.

Yet it wasn't all bad. The meeting itself had a lot of interesting moments. Since my work is very technical and detail oriented I rarely deal with the big picture of cancer--I just work on defining surface markers and measuring how different drugs change the morphology of cells and the genetic profile of the targeted normal and cancerous cells. It's my boss that worries about the big picture.

As a result, this meeting of the top 9 MDs and 2 PhDs in our breast cancer research program was very illuminating to me. That night I saw just how the work I was doing for my boss fit into the big picture of how this entire group, here at UNC, is attacking breast cancer.

Needless to say, I didn't do much talking. 5 sentences, actually. The presentation that I found most interesting addressed the use of SCID mice with human xenograph added. Essentially that's taking a mouse with no immune system and adding a human breast cancer tumor to it. This has the advantage of allowing multiple approaches to killing tumor cells without endangering a patient. For example, in advanced breast cancer the patient is typically treated aggressively with everything in the treatment arsenal. More and more it's becoming apparent that some of these treatments are inimical to the patient but there's no way to determine that until after the fact--if even then. This mouse research using xenographs allows researchers to correlate which cancer cell types or patient genetic factors are treated best with radiation, chemo, or other options.

Genes like HER2 or GATA3 can be indicators of what treatment options are best. This isn't an area I know anything about which is why I was so interested in what was being presented.

While the xenographs are very exciting mice play a strong role in cancer research in a number of other ways. The murine (that means mice for some odd reason--must be due to the Latin name) genome has been mapped completely and is the same approximate size as the human--and murine tumors have also been mapped by DNA microarray with subsequent hierarchical clustering. This data analysis has shown that there's significant overlap in gene profiles between human and mouse cancers. Mice with missing genes, commonly referred to as knockout mice, can also be used to advance understanding and treatment of cancer. All in all, animal models are quite compelling. I only use human tissue in my work so it was fun to hear just how much could be done with other lines of work.