WVU Research Shows Promise for Reducing Risk of Breast Cancer Spreading to the Brain

Research led by Paul Lockman, Ph.D., B.S.N., the inaugural Douglas D. Glover Chair of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the West Virginia University School of Pharmacy and associate director for translational research at the Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center, seeks to better understand why and how breast cancer can spread to the brain with the goal of developing a way to reduce the risk of this phenomenon.

“Unfortunately, the rate of secondary breast tumors in the brain is now threefold higher than it was 10 years ago,” Dr. Lockman said. “Once a woman has a brain tumor coming from the breast, we have few effective therapies.”

Chemotherapy drugs used to treat the secondary breast cancer that spreads to the brain have a difficult time targeting the cancer due to the blood-brain barrier, Lockman said.

He and his team created a new advanced microscopy method to identify and count the number of single breast cancer cells that enter into the brain in a preclinical model.

“Using this method, we demonstrated that by reducing some key inflammatory proteins in the body and in the cancer cell, we can decrease breast cancer cell invasion into the brain by 80 percent,” Lockman said.

The proteins were silenced or turned off through an inhibitor that interfered with the mechanism used by the cell to make certain proteins. Lockman believes there may be available drugs that could produce the same effect in women whose breast cancer has spread to their brains. His research is now focused on identifying those drugs and testing them.

“If we are successful, the next step will be a clinical trial,” Lockman said. “We want to do more than just treat women diagnosed with breast cancer; we want to prevent their cancer from spreading.”

His research, titled “A novel preclinical method to quantitatively evaluate early-stage metastatic events at the murine blood-brain barrier,” is published in the January 2015 issue of “Cancer Prevention Research.” WVU co-authors include Chris E. Adkins, Tori B. Terrell-Hall, Afroz S. Mohammad, and Rajaganapathi Jagannathan. Mohamed I. Nounou of Alexandria University and Rajendar K. Mittapalli of Texas Tech University also co-authored the research.

Lockman is also a member of the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute (WVCTSI), a National Institutes of Health-funded research support organization whose mission is to build clinical and translational research infrastructure and capacity to impact health disparities in West Virginia.

Funding for the research was supported by the National Institutes of Health under award number R01CA166067-01A1 and the Department of Defense under award number W81XWH-062-0033.