Project Summary:
Breast cancer is the most common cancer type, affecting more than 350,000 women in the United States. The American Cancer Society has predicted that one-in-eight women can be diagnosed with breast cancer at some point of their lifetime. Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) is the most rare and aggressive amongst all the breast cancer subtypes. IBC accounts for 10-15% of breast cancer cases in the United States. It has been case studied that Black/African American women are more prone to get affected by IBC as compared to the Caucasian lineage, and physiologically more common in premenopausal women (age less than 40) and/or carriers of BRCA1/2 germ line/acquired mutations. In 2023, 4,914 (highest amongst all cancer types) breast cancer cases (female) were identified in Wisconsin. As per the 2019 cancer registry database, 579 new cancer patients were reported out of which 476 patients were identified analytical to Froedtert & Medical College of Wisconsin. Interestingly, out of 476, 29% (138 individuals, highest count) of primary sites was breast. Therefore, these findings highlight the critical need for advanced therapeutic strategies to improve outcomes, particularly in the management of high-risk, locally advanced, and metastatic IBC cases.
Pre-clinical studies in this proposal will determine the feasibility of a synergistic therapy that would be inexpensive, easy to administer, adaptable to other cancers, and consequently lower the barriers to care that worsen health outcome disparities. The team includes of a synthetic nanochemist (Postdoc), cancer nanotechnologist (mentor), and a breast cancer clinician specializing in IBC treatment (co-mentor) at Froedtert and MCW; thus, the project team has sufficient skills and expertise in translating basic research findings to clinic.