Translational breast cancer researcher Dr. Cyrus Ghajar, epidemiologist Dr. Christopher Li, and immunotherapy expert Dr. Stanley Riddell of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have received a four-year, $25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to learn how to kill metastatic cancer’s deadly seeds before they can sprout.
The new Transformative Breast Cancer Consortium Award, specifically designed to fund high-risk/high-reward research, will bring together a dream team of Hutch researchers, breast cancer patient advocates and collaborators at Huntsman Cancer Institute of Salt Lake City and the University of California at San Francisco. The scientific teams will focus their efforts on devising ways to squelch disseminated breast cancer tumor cells that have traveled to distant tissues like bone marrow and become dormant, a vulnerable precursor state before tumor spread. The researchers will initially focus on bone metastasis and expand from there to research other areas in the body where breast cancer can metastasize or spread.
