Triple-negative breast cancer is a highly aggressive subtype of breast cancer that affects 10% - 15% of all breast cancer patients. According to the American Cancer Society, Black women are more than twice as likely as other ethnic populations to receive a diagnosis of triple-negative breast cancer and are 30% - 40% more likely to die from the disease.

Joan Lewis-Wambi, Ph.D., an associate professor of cancer biology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, wants to know why.

Portrait of Joan Lewis-Wambi
Joan Lewis-Wambi, Ph.D.,
associate professor of
cancer biology
I have family members and friends who have been diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer. And when we hear the statistics about the difference in mortality rates between African American women and others, it's very disheartening, she said on a recent Bench to Bedside podcast produced by The University of Kansas Cancer Center. As a scientist, my research focuses on identifying the factors that drive triple-negative breast cancer aggressiveness with hopes of developing a novel therapeutic target.

Lewis-Wambi is one step closer to that goal. Her lab has identified a unique biomarker that is overexpressed in African American women with triple-negative breast cancer. The biomarker, called interferon-induced transmembrane protein 1 (IFITM1), plays a critical role in promoting the aggressiveness of triple-negative breast cancer in these patients.

Lewis-Wambi’s research was funded by a pilot grant from Alison’s Allies, a group formed in 2010 by Alison Banikowski, Ph.D., a Kansas City-area educator and breast cancer survivor. The group raises funding to support breast cancer screening, care and research. It originally raised funds for the Susan G. Komen Foundation, but when that foundation closed their Kansas City affiliate, Banikowski decided to focus the organization’s efforts locally by supporting KU Cancer Center.

She became a member of Patient and Investigator Voices Organizing Together (PIVOT), an initiative at KU Cancer Center through which cancer survivors, co-survivors and researchers work together to design research that may lead to improved treatments. Working with KU Cancer Center, Alison’s Allies first project supported projects related to breast cancer screening. Banikowski then heard about the challenges of securing funding for pilot research projects.

She had already been struck by the health inequities suffered by African American breast cancer patients when she read Lewis-Wambi’s grant proposal for funding for her pilot project on triple-negative breast cancer. I thought, oh gosh, I've met her, and I've watched her with PIVOT, and I think this would be great, she said. Plus, it was a really well-written grant proposal.

Lewis-Wambi’s lab is designing experiments to understand how the IFITM1 protein works and to determine its relevance to the cancer. The reason triple-negative breast cancer is difficult to treat is that it lacks the three common targets of other breast cancer treatments: estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors and HER2 proteins. Lewis-Wambi hopes to learn enough about the IFITM1 protein to enable the development of a treatment that uses this protein as a target to fight the disease.

My goal is to better understand the biology of triple negative. What drives it? What makes it so different from the estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancers? Can we identify a novel therapeutic target for potential drug development? she said. If we can answer those questions, we can replace fear with hope.

Source: https://www.kumc.edu/about/news/news-archive/triple-negative-breast-cancer-biomarker.html