Dr. Chuck Perou (Distinguished Professor, Genetics and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine) received a new grant from the Department of Defense for his project titled 鈥淭he Breast Cancer Cellular Atlas鈥�.
This project is focused on generating a series of novel biobanks of early and metastatic breast cancers. These include hundreds of treatment-naive surgical samples, which are increasingly uncommon as more patients receiving neoadjuvant therapy. To address the temporal dimension of breast cancer evolution,聽 the Perou lab has assembled 2 longitudinal cohorts sampled throughout neoadjuvant therapy with standard of care chemo- or endocrine therapies. They have established a biobank from 500 patients with metastatic breast cancer who have donated paired tissue specimens of localized and metastatic disease. They have also assembled a biobank of multiple metastatic lesions each from 50 donors who died of breast cancer. Finally, the lab established 74 patient-derived xenograft models from these specimens, which provides a renewable resource of patient-matched models. These molecular data will be complemented by the collection of detailed epidemiological, treatment, survival and histopathology data.