Research Program - Breast Cancer

ABSTRACT The overarching goal of the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCC) Breast Cancer Program (BC) is to improve outcomes for patients with breast cancer through a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development and progression of breast cancer and response to treatment. With a portfolio of basic, translational, clinical, and population-based research, BC focuses on three specific aims. Aim 1 is to advance understanding of the determinants of responsiveness to systemic therapies with a focus on endocrine and HER2-directed therapies. Aim 2 is to elucidate the effects of nutritional, environmental and/or hereditary risk factors on breast cancer susceptibility in experimental models and humans. Aim 3 is to explore the factors affecting malignant progression from preneoplasia to metastatic disease. The LCCC consortium is comprised of Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, based in Washington, DC (LCCC-DC) and the John Theurer Cancer Center of Hackensack Meridian Health, based in Hackensack, NJ (LCCC-NJ). Accordingly, the LCCC catchment area is defined by the LCCC-DC and LCCC-NJ catchment areas. Led by Robert Clarke, PhD, DSc, and Claudine Isaacs, MD, BC has 25 members representing four departments across LCCC Consortium institutions. BC also includes 12 breast cancer patient advocates. The accrual to breast cancer-focused interventional therapeutic trials has averaged 82 patients per year during this grant period. Breast cancer research is highly collaborative and interdisciplinary and would not be possible outside a Cancer Center that adds value through new recruitments, developmental funds, and access to nine state-of-the-art Shared Resources. All SRs are used by BC members. In the current year, BC members are supported by $3.42M ($3.2M LCCC-DC, $219,817 LCCC-NJ) in research grant funding (annual direct costs), of which $2.61M is peer reviewed ($2.44M LCCC-DC, $174,612 LCCC-NJ) and $1.81M is funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) ($1.64 LCCC-DC, $174,612 LCCC-NJ). BC is home to three multi-investigator grants. Productivity is demonstrated by 308 cancer-related, peer-reviewed publications during the current cycle of CCSG support, of which 63 had an impact factor (IF) ? 8. Cancer- and program-related publications included 28% interprogrammatic and 30% intraprogrammatic collaborations. 45% of BC publications involved collaborations with other NCI-designated cancer centers. Interprogrammatic collaborations include collaborators from the other Research Programs (Cancer Prevention and Control [CPC], Experimental Therapeutics [ET] and Molecular Oncology [MO]). Additional noteworthy features include a strong junior investigator mentorship program, the development of novel investigator-initiated clinical trials across the LCCC Consortium with correlative studies and outreach, and research initiatives in the non-Latino Black (NLB) and Latino (H/L) communities within our catchment area.