Breast Cancer

More than 30 physicians and scientists at Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center are reshaping our understanding of breast cancer. This elite group makes the Vera Bradley Foundation Center for Breast Cancer Research a place where science becomes solutions—for people at risk, those fighting the disease, and those who have survived.

This progress starts with generous supporters like you. Your gifts serve as vital funding for our talented researchers to pursue bold ideas. You enable them to gather data, launch clinical trials, and hopefully change how we prevent, detect, and treat breast cancer.

Breast cancer remains the most common cancer diagnosis in women in the United States, and enduring the often-debilitating cancer treatments can become as harrowing as the diagnosis itself.

That’s especially true for Black women, who face disparate outcomes in breast cancer and are more likely to experience neuropathy. A side effect from chemotherapy that causes numbness, tingling and pain in the hands and feet, neuropathy is the primary reason patients cannot complete prescribed chemotherapy, which compromises cure rates.That’s why IU researchers are leading the way to improving the quality of life and curative chemotherapy doses for Black patients with breast cancer.

In a clinical study led by IU physician-scientist Bryan P. Schneider, MD, researchers have discovered that Black patients with breast cancer experience less neuropathy and less reductions in their chemotherapy dose when treated with a chemotherapy drug called docetaxel. These findings represent an important shift in knowledge about a patient population that has historically been underrepresented in breast cancer research.

The study is among the first National Cancer Institute cooperative group trials to focus enrollment solely on a minority population that has disparate outcomes. The trial enrolled only women who self-identified as Black or African American. Tarah J. Ballinger, MD, presented results from the study at the 2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting, the world’s largest oncology meeting. Chosen from more than 5,000 research abstracts that are part of the meeting, the study was part of the ASCO press program and among fewer than 0.5% that were highlighted for media.

Led by Hari Nakshatri, PhD, researchers have completed the most extensive mapping of healthy breast cells to date. These findings offer an important tool for researchers at IU and beyond to understand how breast cancer develops and the differences in breast tissue among genetic ancestries.

Nakshatri developed a comprehensive atlas of breast tissue cells — including details on how the genome is organized in each cell type, the genes expressed and what specific gene expressions are limited to each cell type. These details can help researchers understand what is driving each cell type’s function in various parts of the breast.

Nakshatri’s lab sequenced 88,000 cell nuclei from 92 women who donated healthy breast tissue to the Komen Tissue Bank at the IU Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center. The donors included people of African, European, Indigenous American, Hispanic, East Asian, Southeast Asian and Ashkenazi-Jewish-European ancestry.

Researchers know breast cancer most often originates in specific cell types, and where it originates leads to different cancer types and treatment responses. This study could improve understanding of breast cancer development and lead to identifying new treatment targets.

Breast cancer is highly variable, making targeted treatment critical to successfully attack the disease. Pravin Kaumaya, PhD, is doing just that with a combination vaccine therapy that uses the immune system’s natural ability to fight cancer.

Working alongside Kathy Miller, MD, Kaumaya is developing a vaccine that triggers the body’s B-cells to produce the right antibody that will attack the cancer cells. He has developed several immune checkpoint vaccines that are intended to be used in combination immunotherapies. Unlike existing immunotherapies for breast cancer, these combination vaccine therapies are designed to stimulate a sustained immune response with minimal toxicity.

Propelled forward as a 100 Voices of Hope-funded project, Kaumaya’s research lab is prioritizing TIGIT (one of the targets for their developed immune checkpoint vaccines) as a target of immunotherapy for invasive breast cancer to be used in combination with other vaccines for both triple negative and HER2+ disease. This combination vaccine therapy will soon be opening as a phase I clinical trial.

Surgery is part of breast cancer treatment for nearly all patients, including breast-conserving surgery (BCS), also called lumpectomy. There are a lot of factors that affect how the breast looks after BCS.

Carla Fisher, MD, is collaborating with researchers at Purdue University on a novel collagen compound as a filler after BCS. Together they have worked on preclinical research and hope to open a clinical trial at IU soon.

Additionally, Fisher is collaborating with Purdue engineering researcher Adrian Buganza Tepole, PhD, to evaluate cosmetic and physical outcomes after BCS using computational modeling of cosmetic outcomes based on factors related to the patient and the tumor.

Now they are planning a prospective study of patients to study pre-operative factors and images and then follow their outcomes after surgery to inform the model. Ultimately, Fisher hopes this work could eventually predict cosmetic outcomes (shape, size of breast, any noticeable defect) for patients to help inform their surgical decisions.

IU researchers are also studying the role of exercise in preventing breast cancer. Scientists know that exercise is associated with a reduced risk for breast cancer, but the mechanism behind that is unclear.

Tarah Ballinger is leading an exercise intervention study in breast cancer prevention. People who are at high risk for breast cancer are participating in a six-month exercise intervention. In partnership with the Komen Tissue Bank, participants are donating breast tissue before and after the exercise program. The goal is to use these samples to evaluate changes in the tissue microenvironment.