The season of medical meetings is coming to an end, and not a moment too soon.

For the past few months I have been going from city to city and from conference to conference focusing on one primary goal: making sure scientists get the message that they can try their research in women rather than mice or rats or cell lines—and that the Army of Women will help.

It is a hard sell.
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Last month I was asked to speak at the Sage Bionetworks 3rd Common Congress about the Foundation and our Army of Women.

Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit organization dedicated to challenging the way we think about science and research, and it was wonderful to be around others who are also dedicated to challenging the status quo!

The conference was in San Francisco, and the Bay Area’s KQED Quest just posted a nice piece on its website about my presentation and the Army of Women. You can read it here.

What’s it really like to hear the words “you have breast cancer?” What’s it like to make treatment decisions? To tell family members and friends? To go through chemotherapy and radiation? To have a mastectomy? To take part in a clinical trial? To learn that you have had a breast cancer recurrence?

Sharing stories helps to build community and expand our understanding of breast cancer. You can read the personal stories others have already shared.

Want to add YOUR story? You can email it to editor@dslrf.org.

An exciting development, but more work needed

We’ve known for some time that breast cancer was more than just one disease. Currently, we think of it as divided into five or six categories, and we classify it—and treat it—according to whether the tumor responds to estrogen or is HER2-positive. In the future, the findings from a new study that divided cancers into subtypes based on their genetic fingerprints may make it possible for us to develop new treatments and new treatment strategies.

The study, the largest gene study of breast cancer tissue to date, was carried out by scientists at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Research Institute, in collaboration with the BC Cancer Agency Vancouver Canada. It involved analyzing the DNA and RNA2 of 2,000 tumor samples taken from women diagnosed with breast cancer between five and 10 years ago.

Using the tumor’s genetic fingerprints, the study revealed 10 subsets of breast cancer. The researchers were also able to identify new genes that drive breast cancer and the relationship between these genes and the known cell signaling pathways that control cell growth, which could lead to the development of new, targeted breast cancer treatments.
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An article recently published by a research group at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Cancer Research showed that women between the ages of 20 and 44 who used the injectable contraceptive Depo-Provera had an increased risk of developing breast cancer. What does this mean for women who are on or who are considering this form of contraception?

Although Depo-Provera (depo-medroxyprogesterone acetate or DMPA) began to be used in other parts of the world more than 30 years ago, the US. Food and Drug Administration did not approve its use until 1992. Most hormonal birth control options include a combination of estrogen and progesterone. Depo-Provera does not include any estrogen—and it is the only progesterone-only option. Women who use this form of birth control receive a Depo-Provera injection every 12 weeks.

Depo-Provera contains the same progestin that was used in the Women’s Health Initiative study, which found women on menopausal hormone therapy (previously known as hormone replacement therapy) had an increased risk of developing breast cancer. This led researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in Seattle, to question whether young women using Depo-Provera for birth control might also have an increased risk of developing breast cancer.
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We’ve got a month to go before supporters of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation gather for the Fifth Annual Love Walk/Run, and I hope that you are as excited as I am to hit the streets!

Since we started the Love Walk/Run in 2007 in partnership with the Pacific Palisades Women’s Club, I’ve seen the number of participants grow each year. I’ve also seen them change: we now have kids who were pushed in a stroller in their first walk now riding the route on their own bikes!

This year’s Love Walk/Run will be taking place on Sunday, May 20th, and it’s sure to be the best yet! You can learn more and register yourself or your family here.

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This year’s American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting was held in Chicago, from March 31 to April 4, bringing together close to 17,000 scientists from throughout the world. This meeting is always exciting, and offers lots to learn; it includes research into all different kinds of cancers and explores the basic biology of carcinogenesis, metastases, and treatment.

This makes it very distinct from the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, which focuses only on breast cancer, and the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting, which focuses primarily on clinical treatment.  Like the AACR meeting, this blog will be focused more on the big picture in cancer research and the new approaches that are in the wings rather than particular studies.

I always return from an AACR meeting with my head spinning because the presentations give me so much to think about. The first big observation I made is that the focus of the basic scientists seems to be small. I fully understand that basic research is done by controlling all the factors that you can and then altering just one to see what happens. Nonetheless, for a big picture person such as myself, it often feels like the attention that is given to a very small finding makes it all too easy to forget that this discovery only represents one very, very small piece of the entire cancer puzzle—and that while scientists now know what this piece is, we still don’t know what the whole puzzle looks like.  
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Spring is the time for new growth, and thanks to you we’re growing!

As you know, we at the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation feel a sense of urgency in our work.  Every day 110 women in the US die of breast cancer!  We need to work efficiently and effectively to push the boundaries of breast cancer research by conducting the studies and asking the questions that no one else will ask!

Thinking outside the box is risky. You take big chances, and it’s less clear if you will succeed than if you study just a slightly different version of a new drug or treatment or don’t act at all.

That’s why it means so much to me that you encourage us to take risks by supporting our work. And it’s because of your support and your belief in what we do that we are able to grow and expand our Foundation in ways that will allow us to move even faster!
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The conventional wisdom is that estrogen causes breast cancer. If you want to grow breast cancer cells in a petri dish, you need to add estrogen. And if a postmenopausal woman has an estrogen receptor positive (ER+) tumor you treat it with an aromatase inhibitor, which blocks estrogen production in the breast. So, when researchers looked at what happened to the women in the Women’s Health Initiative study who had had a hysterectomy and who were randomized to get either estrogen or a placebo, the results should have been a slam dunk: increased breast cancer in those on estrogen!

But no! An article published online yesterday in the Lancet Oncology showed that the women in the WHI study who took estrogen alone for about five years had a lower risk of developing breast cancer than the women who were on a placebo. What? Why? In sum—it’s complicated.
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Aromatase inhibitors are recommended for and widely used as anti-estrogen therapy for postmenopausal women. Numerous studies have shown that these drugs—anastrazole (Arimidex), letrozole (Femara), and exemestane (Aromasin)—are effective in reducing the risk of a breast cancer recurrence in women with early-stage disease. They also have a well-known side effect: bone loss.

After it became clear that bone loss was a common side effect, many oncologists began to routinely prescribe bisphosphonates—drugs that can help prevent bone loss—to their patients who were on an AI. The thought was that these drugs, like alendronate (Fosamax) and zoledronic acid (Zometa), would keep women on an AI from developing osteoporosis. It was also thought—and some studies had suggested—that a bisphosphonate might reduce the risk of a woman developing bone metastases.
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