At the Biomanufacturing Research Institute and Technology Enterprise (BRITE) at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), researchers are engaged in drug discovery for two relatively rare forms of breast cancer.
First, some basics.
- One of every 8 women in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime.
- There are many types of breast cancer.
- Standard treatments can include radiation, surgery, hormonal therapy, immunotherapy and chemotherapy. The medical establishment is trying to move away from chemotherapy, however, as it tends to kill not just cancer cells but also fast-dividing normal cells, said Professor Kevin Williams, Ph.D.
- In general, five-year survival rates are 90%. They are substantially worse, however, for some forms of breast cancer.
“For rare forms of cancer, there may be few treatment options and chances are that big pharmaceutical companies may not be working on it,” Williams said.
Williams focuses on Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) which accounts for 1% to 5% of all breast cancer cases.
“If you go to the local general practitioner, there is a good chance they’ve seen one case of IBC in ten years,” said Williams, who worked in the biopharmaceutical industry for 15 years prior to joining NCCU.
IBC is one of the deadliest forms of breast cancer, with a 40% survival rate over five years.
Most breast cancers can be detected with regular mammography screenings, which can detect a lump. With IBC, however, a lump does not typically develop.
“It’s easy to be misdiagnosed,” Williams said. “It can look like a skin rash. If it gets missed or misdiagnosed, it progresses rapidly.”
A definitive diagnosis can only be made with a biopsy.
Meanwhile, Associate Professor John Scott, Ph.D., is engaged in drug repurposing for triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), which accounts for 10% – 15% of all breast cancer cases. There tends to be a higher incidence of TNBC in young African American women, Scott said.
TNBC lacks biological markers that are targeted by drugs used to treat other types of breast cancer and thus, many breast cancer drugs cannot be used for TNBC, which makes it more difficult to detect and treat, Scott said.
Drug repurposing in oncology means using drugs already approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and on the market for non-cancer indications but which can be used for cancer treatment purposes.
“Aspirin, for example, was originally used for pain,” Scott said. “Now it’s also used for cardiac patients.”
Such drugs probably would not replace treatments like chemotherapy but could reduce the odds of TNBC recurring, Scott said.
Finding such drugs typically starts with a lab-based approach called high-throughput screening to identify drugs with effects on cancer cells. BRITE has 150,000 compounds onsite, including a subset consisting of approved drugs that can be used for this type of testing.
Alternatively, “If you are now looking for new drugs for IBC, maybe the answer is already in the literature,” Williams said. “There are so many publications, you can’t read everything.”
In a process called text mining, every paper that has been published on cancer can be analyzed to search for connections to diseases similar to the cancer being researched.
“If there are already drugs, they can potentially be re-used to treat your cancer,” Williams said.
With this approach, NCCU researchers have found about 20 drugs that look “potentially interesting.” Those drugs are next confirmed in a laboratory – first in test tubes and next in mice.
Disparities in Breast Cancer
At the Julius L. Chambers Biomedical and Biotechnology Research Institute (JLC-BBRI), the mission is to help alleviate racial health disparities.
Breast cancer is squarely within that mission, according to Nicole Salazar Velmeshev, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of biological and biomedical sciences.
“Black people die more often,” Salazar said. “They are more likely to develop aggressive forms of cancer at an earlier age.”
Salazar conducts research on proteins found in different types of tumor cells. These proteins, which are known as chemokine receptors, play a role in cancer cells moving from the breast to other parts of the body such as lymph nodes, brain, bones or lungs (metastasis).
“The goal is to understand the pattern of receptors,” Salazar said. “If you know how they are expressed, you can reduce cancer growth.”
Her research has three basic goals. First, figure out how to better target receptor proteins. Second, to understand how they affect survival probabilities. Third, to understand the ecosystem surrounding a tumor.
NCCU has partnered with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Carolina Breast Cancer Study (CBCS), where 50% of the participants are Black.
