The Breast Cancer Research Program includes 29 faculty members from eight departments and two schools to form an integrated program that is dedicated to research on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. The program is currently supported by $3,465,104 in NCI funding and $4,755,188 in other peer-reviewed funding. Program members have diverse interests including research into breast health communications, the pathology and biology of premalignant lesions, the development of intrinsic breast cancer subtype assays, translational research on endocrine therapy resistance in the context of cooperative group neoadjuvant endocrine therapy trials, the development of novel therapeutics that target both tumor cells and bone and the immune system cells. We are also very actively investigating novel imaging approaches for predicting response to hormonal therapy. In addition, the program is now collaborating with the Washington University Genome Sequencing Center in an effort to unravel the genetic changes associated with breast susceptibility, initiation, progression, relapse, and resistance. Program members are developing new breast cancer models in order to develop preclinical justifications for investigator initiated clinical trials in our developmental therapeutics programs. Classes of agent under development include phosphoinositol-3-kinase inhibitors, hedgehog inhibitors, check point homolog kinase (CHK1) inhibitors and Trop2 antibodies. The program consists of a number of basic, translational, and clinical investigators who meet weekly in a highly interactive scientific milieu. Large numbers of breast cancer patients are being treated on clinical protocols at Washington University with a number of Siteman Cancer Center cores are essential for the mission ofthe program, including the Clinical Trials Core, Imaging Response Assessment Team, Tissue Procurement Core, the Molecular and Genomic Analysis Core, the Biostatistics Core, the Bioinformatics Core, and the Proteomics Core.
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