Medical Oncology CancerCARE News Archive Featured in the Media JeffNEWS

The latest advances in both breast cancer treatment and research – including innovations in surgical, imaging, chemotherapy and radiation approaches – will be discussed Friday, February 23, 2007 at a breast cancer symposium at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson in Philadelphia.

The all-day, breast cancer symposium, part of an annual series at the Kimmel Cancer Center, will be held at the Bluemle Life Sciences Building, 233 S. 10^th Street, beginning at 8:20 a.m.

“We’re highlighting the new discoveries that we believe will be important for new therapies in patients with breast cancer,” says Richard Pestell, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson and professor and chair of cancer biology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University.

Congressman Robert Brady will be on hand to give out the inaugural Congressman Robert A. Brady Cancer Lecture Series Award to Arthur Pardee, Ph.D., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. A National Academy of Sciences member and a distinguished cancer researcher, Dr. Pardee is best known for his research involved in the discovery of messenger RNA and in tumor growth and regulation.

The symposium program covers an extraordinary range of topics. For example, speaker Michael Lisanti, M.D., Ph.D., professor of cancer biology at Jefferson Medical College, will be discussing the caveolin-1 gene and breast cancer. This gene is thought to be a human tumor suppressor gene especially important in the development of breast cancer. “The discovery by Dr. Lisanti’s group of the most frequent gene mutation that we know of to date that occurs in human breast cancer might provide new opportunities for therapy,” says Dr. Pestell.

Max Wicha, M.D., at the University of Michigan and Jeffrey Rosen, Ph.D., of Baylor College of Medicine will describe new results of studies on and potential therapeutic uses of human breast cancer stem cells. Other new discoveries to be highlighted include studies describing a new type of gene that commandeers cancer-causing genes, returning them to normal, potentially predicting the prognosis of an individual with breast cancer.

“The Dachshund gene is unique in reversing the effects of cancer genes in human breast cancer,” explains Dr. Pestell. “Its recent discovery at the Kimmel Cancer Center provides a new prognostic marker for breast cancer and a new target for cancer therapies.”

There will be seminars on the latest in imaging, surgical approaches, and new radiation therapies and chemotherapy as well.

“Today we can see a real reduction in death rates from breast cancer in the developed world through research discoveries supported by individuals and government research funds, but we haven’t found a cure and there’s a lot more work ahead of us,” Dr. Pestell says. “This symposium is designed to bring together researchers, advocates and leaders to define where we are right now in the fight against this common disease, and where we still need to go.”