Dr. Anne Moore

Dr. Anne Moore, the Medical Director of the Weill Cornell Breast Center, will be the featured speaker at the Cancer Support Team‘s 15th annual Gayle K. Lee Women’s Health Awareness Luncheon on Thursday, October 10th, 2013 at the Westchester Country Club.

For more information, please call 914-777-2777.

Click here for more information on the conference.

Click here to watch the video.

Click here to view the section of the special featuring Dr. Vahdat discussing the TM/Copper depletion clinical trial in the videobelow. Click here to view the complete television special on the WABC-TV website.

Supportive Care/Non-Treatment Studies

Treatment Studies

*TNBC = Triple Negative Breast Cancer

The median survival for metastatic triple-negative breast cancer patients is historically nine months. However, the results of the study, recently published in the Annals of Oncology, show that if patients at high-risk of relapse with no current visible breast cancer are copper depleted, it results in a prolonged period of time with no cancer recurrence. Only two of 11 study participants with a history of advanced triple-negative breast cancer relapsed within 10 months after treatment with tetrathiomolybdate (TM).

“These study findings are very promising and potentially a very exciting advance in our efforts to help women who are at the highest risk of recurrence,” says the study’s senior investigator, Dr. Linda Vahdat, director of the Breast Cancer Research Program, chief of the Solid Tumor Service and Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Four of the study participants with a history of metastatic triple-negative breast cancer have had long-term benefit remaining disease free for between three and five and a half years.

“The anti-copper compound appears to be keeping tumors that want to spread in a dormant state,” reports Dr. Vahdat. “We believe one of the important ways it works is by affecting the tumor microenvironment, specifically the bone marrow-derived cells that are critical for metastasis progression.”

In addition, study participants with other forms of high-risk for relapse breast cancers — either stage 3 or stage 4 — without evidence of disease after treatment have also fared well. The progression-free survival rate among these 29 patients in the study has been 85 percent, to date.

“As good as these interim findings look to us, we cannot talk about significant benefit until we compare TM treatment to other therapies,” she says. Dr. Vahdat expects to launch a phase III randomized clinical trial in the near future.

This research is a report of the first 40 patients. The clinical trial, which began in 2007, has been expanded many times and now includes 60 patients, more than half of who have triple-negative breast cancer.

Click here to read the Weill Cornell press release. Click here to read the published research paper.

Cancer cells spread by sticking to the the thin lining of blood vessels, called the endothelium. However, it has been unclear how the cancer cells manage to do this. Researchers in the lab of Michael R. King, professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell, developed a flow chamber that resembles the lining of endothelium in order to determine  how breast cancer cells spread through blood and attach to cells.

In analyzing hormone therapy-resistant breast cancer cells sticking to the endothelium, the researchers accidentally discovered  that these cells interacted with receptor sites in blood vessels known as selectins. The is is a similar process as white blood cells racing to blood vessels to fight infection and inflammation.

The researchers found that the presence of pro-inflammatory molecules called cytokines helped the malignant breast cancer cells adhere to the endothelial wall, thus leading to metastasis. The cytokines then help promote growth of breast cancer cells, triggering other cells to release more cytokines.

The researchers then treated the cells with an anti-inflammatory drug called Metformin, used to treat diabetes. After treatment with Metformin, the cells were not able to metastasize, thus confirming the findings.

The authors write, “There is compelling evidence supporting the strong interplay between various types of inflammation and cancer progression suggested by numerous clinical and epidemiological studies….Taken together, these results suggest that therapeutic approaches targeting cytokine receptors and adhesion molecules on cancer cells may help reduce the likelihood of metastasis and deserve further attention.”

Click here to read the published research study.

Study Details

The purpose of the study is to test how well women with breast cancer respond to treatment with the experimental drug NKTR-102, compared to standard treatments for breast cancer. The study will also look at the side effects of the study drug and examine how long NKTR-102 stays in a patient’s blood.

Treatment Plan

Study participants will be randomly assigned to one of two study arms:

• Arm A: participants will receive NKTR-102 via infusion on Day 1 of each 21 day cycle.
• Arm B: participants will receive one of seven standard of care treatment options available at the study center. The choice of treatment in Arm B will be made after discussions with your doctor. Depending on which drug is chosen by you and your doctor, cycles in Arm B will be either 21 days or 28 days.

The study will take about 38 months to complete. The amount of time on study depends on how well a participant responds to study treatment.

Key Eligibility

• Women age 18 and older
• Diagnosed with breast cancer
• Locally recurrent or metastatic disease
• Prior therapy must have included anthracycline, a taxane, and Xeloda; must have received a minimum of 2 and maximum of 5 prior cytoxic chemotherapy regimens
• Detailed eligibility reviewed when you contact the study team

The researchers discovered that a miRNA (a small, non-coding RNA that regulates gene expression) called miR-708 is inhibited in metastatic triple negative breast cancer. miR708 acts as a metastatic tumor inhibitor, and when its function is restored, the tumors do not spread or form lethal macrometastases.

Triple negative breast cancer was chosen for the examination of the role of miRNAs because it has the worst outcome of all breast cancer subtypes due to its high recurrence rate and metastatic spread.

The researchers found that delivering synthetic miR-708 blocked metastatic outgrowth of triple negative breast cancer cells in the lung of mice. That makes miR-708 a promising therapeutic against metastatic breast cancer. Dr. Vivek Mittal, director of the Lehman Brothers Lung Cancer Laboratory at Weill Cornell Medical College and the study’s senior investigator, said that the findings suggest that agents now being tested for lymphoma cancer cells may also help restore miR-708 in triple negative breast cancer.

Dr. Linda Vahdat, director of the Weill Cornell Breast Cancer Research Program, Chief of the Solid Tumor Service and a co-investigator on the study said, “These study results are terrific. It not only offers us an avenue to treat metastatic triple negative breast cancer in the short-term, but also gives us the road map to prevent metastases in the long-run. We are anxious to get this into the clinic, and we are working as quickly as possible towards that end.”

Click here to read the full press release. Click here to read the published research paper.

The Weill Cornell Breast Center is hosting a seminar on the latest news from the San Antonio Breast Cancer Conference regarding treatment after breast cancer.

WHEN: Thursday, January 17, 2013
5PM-6:30PM
WHERE: 1305 York Avenue (at 70th Street) 2nd Floor, Conference Room B

Refreshments will be served.

Please RSVP:

kif2001@med.cornell.edu