Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is the subtype of breast cancer that is the hardest to treat. TNBC patients account for more than 20,000 cases of this condition annually in the U.S.
alone. They experience worse outcomes than patients with other breast cancer subtypes – their five-year mortality rate is about 40%. The high mortality rate is thought to result from the propensity of the cancer cells to spread or metastasize to other organs and the lack of effective cancer-specific therapies.
At Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Charles Foulds, assistant professor in the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center and member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center, and his colleagues at Baylor are conducting research with the goal to better understand TNBC and potentially identify vulnerabilities that could lead to more effective therapies. Searching for TNBC vulnerabilities with KIPA "In this study, published in PNAS Nexus, we searched for enzymes called kinases, whose expression is typically altered in cancer," said first author of the work, Dr.
Junkai Wang, who was a member of the Foulds lab while he was working on this project. Previous studies in the lab have shown that targeting kinases can be effective therapeutically in other cancers. There are many inhibitors of these enzymes that are already approved by the Food and Drug Administration for human use that could be tested for their potential therapeutic value in TNBC.
The challenge was to identify the kinase among hun.
