New metabolic safeguards against tumor cells revealed

705287540 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:57:10 -0400

Testifying Monday afternoon (March 19) before a U.S. Senate committee hearing on National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, Harvard Medical School Cell Biology Department Chair Joan S. Brugge warned that "four years of flat [NIH] funding have had a devastating impact on the trajectory of cancer research," threatening "the rapid progress in developing effective and less toxic treatments for the myriad different cancers."

HMS creates first known library of breast cancer proteins

50443248 — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:49:49 -0400

In research that could significantly advance the pace of drug discovery in the fight against breast cancer, Harvard Medical School (HMS) investigators announced in Wednesday's (Feb. 8) online Journal of Proteome Research that they have created the first publicly available library of reliably expressible proteins of a human disease, in this case for breast cancer.

Perhaps more significantly, these researchers expressed a subset of the 1,300 protein-expressing complementary DNAs in the library into a model system mimicking cells of a human breast, allowing them to study on a broad scale how these proteins might contribute to the development of breast cancer. Through this comprehensive approach, the researchers identified potentially novel functional activities for both well-known and lesser-known breast cancer-associated proteins.

"The process of carcinogenesis is complex and involves the activation of many different cellular programs," says Joan Brugge, chair of the HMS Department of Cell Biology, and co-principal investigator of this initiative, called Breast Cancer 1000. "A significant limitation for breast cancer research has been the inability to distinguish whether certain proteins that are altered in breast tumor cells are the cause or the effect of conversion of normal breast cells to malignancy. The systematic approach that we've enabled and demonstrated will allow researchers to track cancer-causing proteins in simulated environments, with the goal of learning how to impede them."

"The availability of this collection will enable pilot experimentation and accelerate the development of faster techniques for studying breast cancer in a mammalian setting," says Joshua LaBaer, director of the Harvard Institute of Proteomics (a division of HMS) and also co-principal investigator. "To advance breast cancer research quickly, we are making the BC1000 library publicly available. It can be viewed from the Harvard Institute of Proteomics Web site (http://www.hip.harvard.edu/).

- John Lacey/HMS Communications

Dual signals may drive early breast cancer

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:24:36 -0400

Researchers from the lab of Joan Brugge, Harvard Medical School professor of cell biology, may have uncovered one of the central mechanisms of breast cancer. They found that dual signals provided by ErbB2, a cancer-associated gene commonly known as HER2, appear to be required to disrupt the framework of a breast gland during early tumor development.

all Joan Brugge stories

New metabolic safeguards against tumor cells revealed

HMS creates first known library of breast cancer proteins

Dual signals may drive early breast cancer