Identifying alternatives to prophylactic surgery for breast cancer prevention.

Impact

Prophylactic mastectomy is an effective risk-reduction strategy for high-risk individuals, but it also places a significant burden on patients. Alternative preventive strategies are greatly needed to help patients avoid the pain and financial costs of surgery and one approach is chemoprevention—the use of drugs to prevent cancer initiation or growth. To date, tamoxifen and raloxifene are approved for breast cancer prevention, but their utility in BRCA mutation carriers has not been established. Dr. Liby’s work focuses on developing new drugs and drug-delivery systems for high-risk patients.  

Progress Thus Far

Dr. Liby and her team optimized an innovative strategy in the laboratory to identify safe, well-tolerated new drugs to prevent breast cancer. They found two new compounds that delay the development of breast cancer in experimental models and the team is currently studying how they work. Both of their candidate drugs appear to work in coordination with the immune system. In addition, they tested a new formulation of a PARP inhibitor—a class of drugs currently used to treat breast cancer driven by BRCA mutations. This formulation, in which the drug is encapsulated in nanoparticles, increased the ability of this drug to treat breast tumors, with reduced toxicity.  

What’s next

The team will continue testing the promising drugs they identified. This will include further experiments to reveal the how these drugs work with immune cells to impact tumors, which is essential for understanding which tumor type should be targeted with each therapy.