Christine B. Ambrosone, PhD

Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center
Buffalo, New York

Titles and Affiliations

Professor and Chair
Department of Cancer Prevention and Control
Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center
Buffalo, New York

Research area

Understanding the molecular drivers of aggressive breast cancer in Black women and how these are different in white women.

Impact

Black women are 42 percent more likely to die of their breast cancer than white women. Those diagnosed with breast cancer are more likely to be younger than newly diagnosed white women and are two times more likely to be diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive subtype of the disease. Drs. Ambrosone and Hong are investigating several biological and lifestyle factors that may influence the incidence of TNBC in Black women. This work may provide new insights at the population level into why some women develop more aggressive breast tumors so that personalized prevention and treatment can be designed.

Progress Thus Far

The team is studying immune cells that are in and around breast tumors, and how these types of immune cells differ between more aggressive and less aggressive tumor subtypes and between Black women and white women. They showed that some tumors appear to have a strong immune response, but the cells are actually 'exhausted' and dysfunctional. These findings led to a large national study to see if patients with exhausted immune cells, particularly Black women, could benefit from immunotherapy, which can re-invigorate these exhausted cells. Drs. Ambrosone and Hong also found systemic differences in immune profiles in healthy women related to a variant in the DARC gene, which evolved in African populations and stimulates a strong immune response to fight malaria infection.

What’s next

In the coming year, Drs. Ambrosone and Hong will examine whether DARC gene variants are related to breast tumor characteristics, particularly presence of immune cell types, and to survival outcomes. Understanding this may provide a piece of the puzzle as to why Black women tend to have more aggressive breast tumors.

BCRF funding allowed us to embark on new avenues of research and explore new hypotheses. Because of BCRF funding, we have made important discoveries regarding the molecular underpinnings of aggressive breast cancer.

Biography

Dr. Ambrosone is a Distinguished Professor of Oncology, Chair of the Department of Cancer Prevention and Control, and Senior Vice President for Population Sciences at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is also co-leader of the CCSG Population Sciences Program. She was formerly a member of NCI’s EPIC Study Section and the ACS’s study section on Carcinogenesis, Nutrition and the Environment, and has served on several special emphasis panels and SPORE reviews. She is former Senior Editor for Cancer Research, was a member of the Board of Scientific Advisors to the Director of the National Cancer Institute until 2012, and served on the Interagency Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Coordinating Committee, established by the US Secretary of Health and Human Services to examine the state of the science on breast cancer and the environment and provide recommendations for future directions in research.

Dr. Ambrosone’s research focuses on both the etiology of breast cancer and factors that influence recurrence and survival after breast cancer diagnosis. She leads a number of studies aimed at determining factors that could account for the high prevalence of more aggressive breast tumors among African-American women, and mechanisms underlying these associations. She is also involved in studies of genetic variability in cancer treatment outcomes (pharmacogenetics) and the potential effects of diet, supplements, and lifestyle factors during and after therapy on breast cancer treatment outcomes.