PROJECT 3: Risk Factors for Triple-negative and HER2-overexpressing Breast Cancer Among Hispanic Women and Non-Hispanic Women - This project is the largest of its kind to study the origins and causes of poor-prognosis breast cancers in Hispanic women. The project aims to identify risk factors related to triple-negative and HER2-overexpressing tumors, two particularly aggressive molecular subtypes of breast cancer that disproportionately affect Hispanic women. These cancers are more aggressive because they do not depend on hormones to grow, and so they don't respond to hormone-blocking therapies such as tamoxifen. The study will identify and enroll 1,120 triple-negative and 600 HER2-overexpressing breast cancer cases (including 175 Hispanic triple-negative and 90 Hispanic HER2 cases) from cancer registries in the greater Seattle and Albuquerque metropolitan areas. For control purposes, the study will also look at data from 1,120 cases of luminal breast cancer (including 175 Hispanic women), a less aggressive, more common type of estrogen-dependent breast cancer. Questions the study hopes to address include how risk factors such as reproductive history, breast density, body-mass index and family history of breast cancer may relate to the risks of the aggressive cancer subtypes. Christopher Li, M.D., Ph.D., an associate member of the Hutchinson Center's Public Health Sciences Division, will lead the project in collaboration with Linda Cook, Ph.D., a professor of epidemiology at the University of New Mexico Cancer Center.

PROJECT 4: Relationship of Breast Cancer Subtype, Risk Factors and Ancestry in Hispanic and Non-Hispanic White Women - This study aims to better understand the underlying biology of breast cancer in Hispanic women - and the relationship of ancestry and risk factors to the development of specific breast tumor subtypes - by evaluating genome-wide gene expression in tumor tissue and ancestry of the Hispanic study participants. Until now, gene-expression subtyping of breast cancer has been based entirely on data from studies of non-Hispanic white women. This study hopes to address that gap by analyzing data from 615 Hispanic breast cancer cases. "Disparities in breast cancer survival between racial and ethnic groups have some well-documented social and economic causes. It is possible that differences in tumor biology between groups also contribute to differences in breast cancer outcomes," said project leader Peggy Porter, M.D., a member of the Hutchinson Center's Human Biology Division, who will conduct the study in collaboration with Cook and colleagues at the University of New Mexico Cancer Center.

In addition to the four projects, the grant will cover infrastructural support in administration, ethics and policy, genetics, and training and career development for junior investigators.

Source: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center