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Novel targets in advanced breast cancer in African American patients
Author(s) -
Ambs Stefan
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.27.1_supplement.214.2
Subject(s) - breast cancer , medicine , oncology , disease , adjuvant therapy , cancer , basal (medicine) , insulin
African American (AA) women have the highest breast cancer mortality among all U.S. racial and ethnic groups. The greatest difference in disease mortality between AA and EA patients occurs in the first 2–3 years after diagnosis, which may reflect differences in treatment or differences in the response to therapy, or both. AA patients present more frequently than EA patients with a high‐grade disease, and develop the aggressive basal‐like and triple‐negative (TN) breast cancer subtypes more commonly than other women. Basal‐like and TN tumors have few identified molecular targets for therapy. Thus, chemotherapy remains the treatment of choice for them. Ongoing adjuvant clinical trials are assessing anti‐VEGF and anti‐EGFR monoclonal therapies to treat TN breast cancer. Recent evidence suggests that basal‐like and TN tumors could be more sensitive than other breast tumors to therapy targeting DNA damage repair pathways. Our group seeks to identify tumor biology‐related causes of the survival health disparity between AA and EA patients that has not been captured by the current categorization of breast tumors into more or less aggressive subtypes. In my presentation, I will discuss research assessing the contribution of the catecholamine signaling pathway to cancer progression in AA patients and the application of metabolomics to discover druggable metabolic dependencies of the tumors in this patient group.