Breast cancer is an extremely complex disease. Approximately 15% of breast cancers are found to be triple negative – these cancers are very aggressive and are more likely to spread to other parts of the body than other breast cancers. Triple negative breast cancer does not respond to new “targeted” drugs such as Herceptin or to hormonal therapy which are used to treat other breast cancer types. There is an urgent need to develop new therapies to improve the outcome for triple negative breast cancer. Antibody based treatment of cancer is one of the most successful therapeutic strategies for treating cancer.
The aim of this project is to investigate the expression a number of membrane proteins in triple negative breast cancer; to see if these membrane proteins would be suitable for further investigation as novel antibody drug targets, with therapeutic potential.
We will study these proteins, which are thought to be on the surface of breast cancer cells in tumour samples from triple negative breast cancer patients and also study them in normal (non-cancerous) breast tissues. We will also look at these proteins in cellular models which represent the different sub-types of triple negative breast cancer, to confirm if these proteins are present in the membrane of these cell lines and also to see if their expression is associated with a specific subtype. The outcome of this project will be the first step in investigating these membrane proteins for their potential as antibody drug targets for triple negative breast cancer.
