Titles and Affiliations
Honorary Professor of Oncology
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Scientific Director
Institut Jules Bordet
Brussels, Belgium
Research area
Understanding the molecular alterations in metastatic breast cancer that correlate with disease progression and/or therapeutic resistance.
Impact
Metastatic breast cancer (MBC) is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality among women in the Western world. Dr. Piccart and her team of cancer experts and bio-informaticians are analyzing tumor tissue and blood samples collected from patients enrolled in the AURORA study, a flagship study of BCRF’s Evelyn H. Lauder Founder’s Fund for Metastatic Breast Cancer Research. She and her team hope to identify changes in tumor DNA that affect how the tumor responds to treatment to enable the discovery of new treatments, while improving the effectiveness of current therapies to extend the lives of women and men living with MBC.
Progress thus far
Dr. Piccart’s team is conducting deep molecular analysis of samples taken from the primary tumor and matched metastatic lesions of patients included in the AURORA molecular screening program. The AURORA trial has accrued more than 1,100 women and men from 62 hospitals across 11 EU countries. Analysis of data from 381 patients revealed new potential biomarkers responsible for the development of metastatic breast cancer. Three specific groups of metastatic breast cancer that are difficult to treat due to their poorly understood mechanisms are triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC), and late relapses (cases in which breast cancer has re-appeared 10 years or more after the first diagnosis). The AURORA program (AURORA 2.0) has now been expanded by increasing the sample size of the groups of interest to better understand how metastatic breast cancer evolves in patients with TNBC, ILC, and late relapses.
What’s next
The team is completing integrated analyses of 1,156 patients with the analyses from several AURORA working groups. Their aim is to publish manuscripts from these analyses and share the full dataset with the wider scientific community, including through the BCRF Global Data Hub, to enable more innovative translational research. Sites in five countries are being activated to enroll more patients with ILC, TNBC, and late relapses. These groups represent some of the greatest clinical challenges in metastatic breast cancer. Analyzing data from all AURORA patients will be essential to validate initial findings and to allow for the study of rarer subtypes of breast cancer. This will enable a better understanding of the origin and evolution of metastatic breast cancer.
Biography
Martine J. Piccart, MD, PhD is Honorary Professor of Oncology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium, and Scientific Director at the Institut Jules Bordet. She is co-founder and chair of the Breast International Group (BIG), uniting 57 academic research groups from around the world, running over 30 trials, and developing numerous research programs. AURORA, a study to better understand metastatic breast cancer, is the most ambitious of these.
Dr. Piccart is past president of the EORTC, of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and of the European Cancer Organisation (ECCO) and served on the ASCO and AACR Boards. She has authored or co-authored more than 540 peer-reviewed publications and received numerous prestigious awards, including the Jill Rose Award, the William L. McGuire Award, the Umberto Veronesi Award for the Future Fight against Cancer, the 2013 David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award, the Leopold Griffuel Award and the Bob Pinedo Award in 2018.
