Delineating early events in breast cancer development
Overview
The Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Unit, Manchester, will be based within the Manchester Cancer Research Centre in the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research and will be adjacent to the Christie Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
Researchers at the unit will focus on delineating breast epithelial cell behaviour within its tissue context and determining how the breakdown of normal cell interactions with the local environment result in perturbed tissue organisation, proliferation, and survival of early breast cancers. This work also aims to develop and validate novel, target-specific assays to evaluate breast tissue that may be at risk of developing cancer, determine response to therapy and predict breast cancer resistance.
Our focus
The local cellular microenvironment is a critical determinant in the regulation of normal cell functions. Defects in the way that cells interact with each other and with their surroundings are early changes in neoplasia. In the breast, epithelial cells are the main cell type that becomes transformed in cancer, and their interactions with the environment change markedly during the transition from normal through premalignant to malignant tissue. Cancer cells lose their usual organisation within the breast, alter communication with each other and the stroma, and evade their normal controls on proliferation and apoptosis.
The Breakthrough Research Unit, Manchester, aims to delineate how these processes become defective in the early phases of breast cancer, with the overriding aim of using the information to predict the at-risk breast and to develop new targets for preventative interventions. Researchers will achieve this by determining: (a) mechanisms of epithelial cell disorganisation, including the stem cell niche, (b) mechanisms by which communication between breast epithelium and stromal cells as well as the extracellular matrix become subverted during tumourigenesis, and (c) developing and validating novel target-specific assays to evaluate breast tissue that may be at risk of developing cancer, determine response to therapy, and to predict breast cancer resistance.
