AURORA , CO (Dec. 3, 2008) —Virginia Borges, MD, MMSc, is the recipient of a new grant from the AACR/Breast Cancer Research Fund for her project, “Targeting the Inflammatory Milieu of Pregnancy Associated Breast Cancer.” Dr. Borges, who is an assistant professor of medical oncology at UC Denver and member of the Immunology Program, will receive $246,667 over two years starting in January.
Dr. Borges
Dr. Borges and Pepper Schedin, PhD, associate professor of medical oncology at UC Denver and member of the Cancer Cell Biology Program, are some of the nation’s foremost experts on young women’s breast cancer and its subset of pregnancy-associated breast cancer. They have found that women under age 45 who are diagnosed with breast cancer within five years of giving birth tend to have higher rates of metastases and poorer outcomes. About 11,000 women under the age of 40 are diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States each year. Of that number, about 50 percent had a baby in the six years prior to diagnosis. Those who are diagnosed within two years of giving birth have a 40 percent five-year survival rate, compared to an 70 percent five-year survival rate for women who are 15 years post-delivery at diagnosis.
“This is a large number of our young women, who are a vital part of our society,” says Dr. Borges, who is also a breast cancer clinician. “We’re talking about 30- and 40-something year old women with young children who are entering the vital part of their lives, and we’re losing them to breast cancer for reasons we do not currently understand.”
Drs. Borges and Schedin want to know why breast cancer that arises after a completed pregnancy has a greater ability to metastasize. After several years of looking at inflammation related to weaning as the cause of poorer prognosis, they now think the condition may also be related to the normal pregnancy immune response that keeps a woman’s body from rejecting the developing fetus. They will be testing this hypothesis in the first part of the project by comparing inflammation and immune response markers in women under age 50 who have and have not been diagnosed with breast cancer within six years of giving birth.
“We’re beginning to realize that some of same immune mechanisms that are suppressed during pregnancy are the same mechanisms that cancer cells use to escape the immune system,” she says.
The second part of the project is what Dr. Borges calls “a window of opportunity” study. All women have a normal two- to three-week window between being diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoing their surgery. She is going to take advantage of that time to see if they can measurably change the inflammatory and immune system markers by asking women to take a two-week course or placebo or fish oil or the NSAID celecoxib (brand name Celebrex) and comparing results from the biopsy material and diagnostic blood samples to the tissue and blood retrieved during surgery.
“We know how celecoxib works,” she says. “We’re not so clear about fish oil, but we anticipate that it is safe for future study in nursing women because it the same components that are routinely added to baby formula for healthy brain development. Fish oil is also reported to have anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties. If we can blockade this increased risk of metastases by having women take fish oil, how beautiful is that?”
The University of Colorado Cancer Center is the Rocky Mountain region’s only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center. NCI has given only 40 cancer centers this designation, deeming membership as “the best of the best.” Headquartered on the University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus , UCCC is a consortium of three state universities (Colorado State University , University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Colorado Denver ) and six institutions (AMC Cancer Research Center , The Children’s Hospital, Denver Health, Denver VA Medical Center, National Jewish Health and University of Colorado Hospital). Together, our 400+ members are working to ease the cancer burden through cancer care, research, education and prevention and control. Learn more at www.uccc.info.