During the past several years, researchers have come to understand that breast cancer is not a single disease but rather a spectrum of conditions that vary in their biology and response to treatment. The SU2C Breast Cancer Dream Team focuses on three major subtypes of breast cancer—ER positive, HER2 positive, and triple negative (that is, simultaneously ER negative, PR negative, and HER2 negative)—with the hope of developing novel therapies for women with this disease.
Over time, cancer cells can develop ways of “outsmarting” the drugs and agents designed to kill them, a phenomenon known as drug resistance. This Dream Team studies the driving mechanisms that lead to drug resistance and the role that cancer stem cells play in resistance.
The team has gathered the vast amount of information that exists about breast cancer into an integrated database to form a “discovery platform”—a basis for identifying and validating new drug combinations and targets that can be pursued in clinical trials.