The Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) is investing $70.3 million—BCRF’s largest annual program in its 31-year history— to fund breast cancer research in 2024-2025, supporting more than 260 scientists at leading academic and medical institutions across 15 countries. The investment will span the entire spectrum of the disease, from its very origins to its farthest reach: metastatic disease.
The Foundation serves as the sentinel of innovation—bridging institutions, scientists, and data around the world. With this unparalleled private funding, BCRF is poised to propel breakthroughs to achieve its two key goals: prevent breast cancer and end its life-threatening grasp. Key areas of research include investments in artificial intelligence and contrast enhanced mammography to improve screening and early detection; precision prevention strategies like vaccines for high-risk populations; and better, more effective treatments, especially for aggressive forms of the disease.
Two projects led by Dr. Joaquin Arribas and Dr. Judith Balmaña have been selected in this BCRF call:
BCRF, 18 Years funding Dr. Joaquin Arribas’s lab research
Dr. Joaquin Arribas, leader of the VHIO’s Growth Factors Group, has received one of the BCRF grants to develop new therapies that leverage the immune system to treat breast cancer.
Normal cells respond to damage by halting cell division, putting the cells in a state of cellular senescence. Similarly, malignant cells will become senescent, a process called senolysis, in response to some therapies. While senescent tumor cells no longer proliferate, they remain molecularly active and produce factors that promote aggressiveness in neighboring tumor cells.
“In the lab we focus on developing novel strategies to redirect the immune system against senescent cells, thereby eradicating them and increasing the efficacy of breast cancer therapies” explains Dr. Joaquin Arribas.
Dr. Arribas and his team developed experimental models that helped to establish that cellular senescence can exert either anti- or pro-tumorigenic effects depending on the stage of the tumor and the immune cells present in the immediate tumor environment. Preliminary studies indicate that senescent cells promote the anti-tumor immune response at early stages of tumor formation while inhibiting it at later stages.
“In this context,” Arribas continues, “we have developed a new strategy that combines therapies that promote senescence with others that mitigate protumor effects, maintaining the antitumor effect of senolysis and avoiding the unwanted effect of accelerating premalignant lesions.”
Next Steps
Over the next year, Dr. Arribas and his team will develop laboratory models that mimic both early and advanced lesions to explore new ways of optimize the use of senolytic drugs and expand the number of anti-tumor tools for treating breast cancer. This research line adds to a previous BCRF-funded project, developing next-generation CAR T cells for the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer, which is set to enter clinical development early next year.
Toward a Personalized Assessment of Genetic Risk for Breast Cancer
“The current clinical approach for assessing breast and ovarian cancer risk relies on the evaluation of family history and performing genetic testing to detect variants in genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer.,” explains Dr. Judith Balmaña, medical oncologist at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital and head of the Hereditary Cancer Genetics Group at VHIO.
“However,” she adds, “here are additional genetic variants associated with disease susceptibility that are not captured by common tests. This wider genetic variation may modify the average risk attributed to carriers of pathogenic variants and may also explain the “currently unknown” genetic susceptibility in people who do not carry these variants..”
Polygenic risk scores (PRS) are a composite of common genetic variation that can be used to refine a person’s susceptibility to diseases that cannot be solely explained by a single pathogenic variant, thus personalizing hereditary cancer risk assessment
Dr. Balmaña and her team are setting up the required infrastructure to perform a study of 200 whole genome sequencing (WGS) to calculate PRS for candidates for breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility testing. The team has made progress developing a genetic variant interpretation pipeline and designing a genetic counseling protocol.
Pilot Study
Dr. Balmaña is beginning a pilot study enrolling 20 participants calculating their PRS. The team will assess challenges in recruitment, genetic analysis, variant interpretation, and results disclosure from the pilot to inform the larger scale trial. Following this, they will begin a second phase with 180 participants undergoing cancer genetic susceptibility testing. The team will simultaneously assemble a prospective cohort of women tested to validate the predictive model in their patient population.
About the Breast Cancer Research Foundation
The Breast Cancer Research Foundation is a nonprofit organization committed to achieving prevention and a cure for breast cancer. We provide critical funding for cancer research worldwide to fuel advances in tumor biology, genetics, prevention, treatment, metastasis and survivorship.
Since our founding in 1993 by Evelyn H. Lauder, BCRF has raised more than a billion dollars to fuel its mission to be the end of breast cancer. Through a unique and streamlined grants program, we seek out the brightest minds in science and medicine and give them the necessary resources to pursue their best ideas. This enables researchers to make discoveries and design new approaches to address all aspects of breast cancer—and do so in record time.