- Page: 1 | 2
Assessing and preventing
As Colditz and co-investigator Susan Hankinson, Sc.D., of the Channing Lab work to give postmenopausal women a better measure of their risk for breast cancer, their colleagues at Dana-Farber and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) will be exploring a promising new approach to breast cancer prevention. "Graham [Colditz] and I had spoken on several occasions of combining our work into a single project on breast cancer risk and prevention," says Judy Garber, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Friends of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Risk and Prevention Clinic, who is a co-principal investigator of the project. "The creation of the DF/HCC is helping make that possible."
Participating in the study of breast cancer risk and prevention are (above, left to right): Susan Hankinson, Sc.D., M.P.H., Brigham and Women's Hospital; Nadine Tung, M.D., Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Judy Garber, M.D., M.P.H., of Dana-Farber; and (inset) Graham Colditz, M.D., Dr.P.H., Brigham and Women's.
Older women with high levels of estrogen can reduce their risk of breast cancer by taking medications such as tamoxifen (or raloxifene in an ongoing national study), which prevent estrogen from attaching to breast cells and stimulating their growth. Tamoxifen's side effects — which include a small increase in the risk of blood clots and endometrial cancer, especially in women over 50 — have made women and their physicians less enthusiastic about its use. Garber and co-investigator Nadine Tung, M.D., of BIDMC plan to undertake a study that involves a medication called an aromatase inhibitor. Instead of preventing estrogen from binding to breast cells, aromatase inhibitors work several steps "upstream" — preventing the body from assembling estrogen from its chemical components. Aromatase inhibitors have been shown to be effective in reducing circulating estrogen levels and are commonly used to treat metastatic or recurrent cancers. They haven't yet been studied for breast cancer prevention. In the new study — a "pilot" program that precedes a full-scale clinical trial — postmenopausal women with the highest levels of estrogen and its components in their blood will take an aromatase inhibitor every day for a year. The goal is to make sure the medication's side effects are tolerable, and to determine whether it causes participants' breasts to become less dense on mammogram tests — presumably lowering the risk of breast cancer. If the pilot study is successful, other researchers within the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center will design large clinical trials for determining whether aromatase inhibitors can play a role in preventing breast cancer.
The project is one of eight within the Dana-Farber/ Harvard Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in Breast Cancer, which received funding from the National Cancer Institute this fall.
"This project represents the essential characteristics of our eight SPORE projects: they are multidisciplinary; they involve more than one institution in the DF/HCC; and they directly translate into prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of breast cancer," says Dana-Farber's Dirk Iglehart, M.D., co-director of the SPORE. "The researchers deserve much credit for proposing this highly innovative and important project."
- Page: 1 | 2 | Back to main story
