Andrew Lane, PhD, leader of the Structural Biology Program at the University of Louisville, Teresa W-M. Fan, PhD, Director of the Center for Regulatory Environmental Analytical Metabolomics, and Anees Chagpar, MD, director of the Multidisciplinary Breast Program at the James Graham Brown Cancer Center, have been awarded a grant in the amount of just over $173,000 to support a project titled “Identifying predictive biomarkers in breast cancer patients by metabolomics.” The grant will fund the project for one year beginning July 1, 2010 and is supported by the Commonwealth of Kentucky-funded Clinical and Translational Science Pilot Grant Program at UofL.

The study aims to discover biomarkers of breast cancer using the metabolic profiles of cancerous and non-cancerous breast tissue from humans with cancers of different stages, from I to III. The cancerous tissue will be compared to non-cancerous tissue from the same subjects, and further be correlated with the more readily accessible nipple aspirate fluid and blood plasma. The researchers will compare the metabolism– the overall biochemical function in the tissue – in cancerous versus non-cancerous tissue to identify novel biomarkers and test for specific sets of known biomarkers for energy and anabolic metabolism, with the goals of improving diagnostic techniques, and of eventually improving therapy for breast cancer patients.

Since each patient acts as her own control, the researchers believe that subtle differences will be detectable.

Lane and Fan’s work is based on the principles of metabolomics, which examines metabolic activity at the atomic level, and has demonstrated that cancer cells differ greatly from normal cells in terms of their metabolic characteristics.  The hope is that these measurable differences will yield strategies to better treat human cancers.