Breast cancer research advancing at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Breast cancer treatments have changed dramatically over the years, from radical surgery a century ago to more targeted therapies available today.

Experts said there is still an urgent need for new and better options to screen and treat the disease that is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women in the United States other than skin cancers, according to the American Cancer Society. One in 8 women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in her lifetime, and 1 in 43 will die of it, according to the ACS.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island is part of that effort, focusing on biomedical research. The private nonprofit lab on Suffolk's North Shore has 600 scientists, a second campus in China, a test facility for drug candidates and a fully funded program for about 112 PhD students.

Almost 40% of its research budget comes from federal grants, including the National Institutes of Health, where the Trump administration has canceled some grants and proposed additional cuts.

"It's really important that funding is continued and in fact, expanded," said David Spector, a cancer researcher and professor at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Of the more than 300,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer a year, "about 43,000 succumb to the disease. We have to reduce those numbers."

Camila dos Santos, an associate professor and breast cancer researcher at the lab, said any NIH cuts would impact "the ability of the research community to develop, test, and improve the treatment of aggressive subtypes of cancer and other chronic diseases" and could lead to "catastrophic future consequences on ensuring quality of life and health to many men and women."

U.S. Health and Human Services spokeswoman Emily Hilliard, in a statement, said "NIH is committed to restoring the agency to its tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science" and is focused on "identifying the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic."

Newsday spoke with dos Santos and Spector about how their work could impact future breast cancer treatments.

Studying why pregnancy lowers cancer risk

Dos Santos oversees a lab focused on the risk of breast cancer among young women, a group that has seen an increase in recent years.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said about 10% of all new breast cancer cases are diagnosed in women under age 45.

"We know that mutations to your DNA increase your predisposition to develop breast cancer," dos Santos said during a recent interview in her lab. "However, not everything can be explained by genetics alone."

She and her staff are examining the impact of puberty, pregnancy and infections on a woman’s body to see if they are increasing or decreasing a risk of developing cancer.

For example, dos Santos said, breasts change during pregnancy as they prepare to deliver milk for a newborn.

"How does that influence breast cancer risk?" said dos Santos. "Epidemiology information for over 100 years has shown that women who are pregnant early in life have a decreased risk of breast cancer."

One ongoing study looked at cells from mice that were placed into early pregnancies. After the pregnancy was over, their bodies still had a "memory" that allowed them to produce milk earlier in their next pregnancy, she said. In addition, immune cells were more sensitive to any changes such as the development of cancerous cells. The immune cells then removed any questionable cells even before they become cancerous, dos Santos said.

Researchers in her lab are now trying to develop ways to activate those immune cells to attack cells before they become cancerous for possible use as a vaccine.

'Among the most aggressive forms' of cancer

Triple-negative breast cancer is an especially difficult type of breast cancer to treat.

"It is among the most aggressive forms of the disease," said the lab's Spector.  "The cells divide rapidly, they will take on many genomic alterations, and the cells will metastasize in many cases — not all — from the tumor to other sites in the body."

Because these cancer cells do not have estrogen or progesterone receptors that would allow them to be treated with hormones, and don't have enough of the HER2 protein that also responds to treatment, they are called "triple negative." They make up about 10% to 15% of breast cancer cases.

Some of Spector’s research focuses on how the disease takes over cell functions in both triple-negative breast cancer and another form of breast cancer called invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) of the breast. ILC starts in breast glands but can spread to other parts of the body.

Spector said while most people with breast cancers that respond to hormone therapy, including ILC of the breast, do well, "there is a subset of those individuals [with ILC] that relapse, and when they relapse, many of them relapse as triple negative," he said.

Spector said he and his associates are looking at regions of the human genome, a person’s genetic code mapped out in their DNA, that have not typically been examined. Specifically they are identifying RNA molecules that may be more present in these subtypes of breast cancer as opposed to noncancerous breast cells.

"The hope is to identify some molecules ... in triple-negative breast cancer and work with our partners to develop drugs against these molecules," he said, reducing the severity of the disease and chances the cancer will spread.