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 strike out and pursue bold ideas. You enable them to gather data, launch clinical trials, and hopefully change how we prevent, detect, and treat breast cancer.

Your contributions make discoveries possible.

Kathy Miller, MD, is leading a phase II clinical trial in which patients receive a pair of drugs to treat triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). One drug is aimed at their tumor’s primary genetic driver and another focuses on the gene that helps the cancer survive. The team is first studying the safety of the combination as part of a “Stand Up to Cancer Dream Team.” The trial is funded by a prestigious Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant from the National Cancer Institute. Miller and Ken Nephew, PhD, are among nearly 20 scientists at six institutions who oversee the $12.5 million effort to improve epigenetic cancer therapies, which aim to reprogram gene expression for a therapeutic effect.

In collaboration with Hari Nakshatri, PhD, and Bryan Schneider, MD, at IU and Christine Ambrosone, PhD, at the Roswell Park Cancer Center, Miller is also leading a multi-center clinical trial evaluating a treatment specifically for Black women with aggressive triple negative breast cancer. If successful, this trial will improve outcomes for Black women.

This trial builds on discoveries in Nakshatri’s lab on the biology behind aggressive breast cancers in Black women.

Once a patient undergoes treatment for TNBC, remnants of the disease called “circulating tumor DNA” are present in their blood. Schneider and his colleagues discovered that measuring its presence is a critical predictor of whether the disease will return—findings published in the prestigious medical journal JAMA Oncology.

Phase II of this project, now called the PERSEVERE study, is ongoing and focuses on women at the highest risk for recurrence. Schneider is leading this $12 million trial at more than a dozen sites across the United States, enrolling at least 200 women with early-stage TNBC. Participants will be assigned a targeted therapy to match their tumors’ genetic makeup. The goal is to use personalized therapies to decrease the risk of relapse.

The world’s only healthy breast tissue bank, the Susan G. Komen Tissue Bank at IU Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, welcomed Michele Coté, PhD, as its executive director in late 2022. Coté is broadening the bank’s research with an epidemiological focus, studying the impact of long-term lifestyle and benign breast disease on breast cancer.

In her first year, Coté guided the tissue bank in expanding its collections to include healthy male breast tissue. IU researchers know that male breast cancer behaves and develops differently than that in women, and they are now working to discover more about the disease.

Researchers are already making progress. Using donated male breast tissue cells, Nakshatri has built a model that makes healthy breast cells become cancerous.

Liz Yeh, PhD, is examining how specific immune cells support metastatic breast cancer development—and how to stop it. Cells called macrophages usually perform essential tasks as part of the immune system, but breast cancer cells can hijack them to protect cancer cells and help them metastacize. When this happens, they become tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs).

The Yeh lab’s goal is to interrupt that communication process between those two cell types – the tumor cells and the macrophages – to prevent metastasis from happening. Building on her 100 Voices of Hope-funded project, Yeh is targeting an enzyme called HUNK. The presence of HUNK in breast cancer cells leads to communication with tumor-associated macrophages to promote this metastatic process.

Understanding why the immune system is not killing cancer like it is supposed to do could unlock new approaches to treating breast cancer. Mateusz Opyrchal, MD, PhD, believes researchers will cure metastatic breast cancer through immunotherapy – teaching the patient’s immune system to fight their cancer. His lab is examining a specific immunosuppressive cell type that could be interfering with the immune system’s ability to attack cancer and designing strategies to reprogram the immune system to recognize cancer. The team was recently awarded a NIH grant to continue the research with ultimate goal of starting clinical trials.

Opyrchal is designing a better test to predict which breast cancers and other solid cancers will respond to immunotherapy combinations. Using cancer cells and immune cells from patient biopsies, the study team will mix them in a petri dish and test if they can activate the patient’s immune cells against the cancer. The hope is to develop individualized care based on the results.

Tarah Ballinger, MD, is evaluating exercise's role in supporting those living with metastatic breast cancer. For early-stage patients, research has already shown that exercise improves quality of life, lessens the short and long-term side effects of treatment, improves response to chemotherapy, and is associated with improved survival. Ballinger wants to discover if exercise has similar benefits for patients with metastatic disease as more and more are living long, full lives.