{"id":1424,"date":"2016-08-17T09:58:11","date_gmt":"2016-08-17T13:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/?p=1424"},"modified":"2016-08-17T10:06:39","modified_gmt":"2016-08-17T14:06:39","slug":"new-consortium-to-study-environmental-causes-of-breast-cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/2016\/08\/17\/new-consortium-to-study-environmental-causes-of-breast-cancer\/","title":{"rendered":"New Consortium to Study Environmental Causes of Breast Cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by:\u00a0Rich Barlow\u00a0| Source: BU Research<\/a><\/p>\n

Cancer researcher David Sherr<\/a> is gunning for a disease that has upended his life. His wife died\u00a0from multiple myeloma 15 years ago.<\/p>\n

So when the Art beCAUSE Breast Cancer Foundation<\/a>, a nonprofit supporting research into the environmental causes of breast cancer, approached him for ideas to accelerate progress, Sherr, a Boston University School of Public Health (SPH) professor of environmental health, was ready.<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Sherr has long been a friend of ours and a supporter,\u201d says Eleanor Anbinder (SED\u201962), who cofounded the foundation with Joyce Creiger (CAS\u201962) in 2001. \u201cOne day, I said to him, \u2018How can we speed this research up?\u2019\u201d Sherr suggested a four-laboratory collaboration, two from Tufts and two from BU: his own, which researches the mechanisms through which environmental chemicals suppress the immune system, among other topics, and the lab<\/a> of Stefano Monti<\/a>, a BU School of Medicine associate professor of computational biomedicine, who also has an appointment at SPH. The two from Tufts are led by Gail E. Sonenshein, a Tufts professor of developmental, molecular, and chemical biology, and Charlotte Kuperwasser, an associate professor of developmental, molecular, and chemical biology.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rest,\u201d Anbinder says, \u201cis history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Art beCAUSE has given a three-year, $5 million grant to the new Art beCAUSE Breast Cancer Research Consortium and is hoping to attract matching grants from other donors. The idea for such a multilab consortium, says Sherr, consortium director, \u201cwas something I stole from lots of literature about team science. It\u2019s much harder to do science by yourself. It has to be team science if you really want to get somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of every eight American women gets breast cancer, and 40,000 a year die from it, says Sherr. He shared his hopes for the consortium with BU Research<\/em>.<\/p>\n

BU Research: <\/em><\/strong>Why this consortium?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Sherr: <\/strong>The idea is to build evidence that the environment really is contributing majorly to breast cancer. Gail Sonenshein and Charlotte Kuperwasser are major breast cancer researchers.<\/p>\n

Do we know that environmental factors can cause breast cancer?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

There\u2019s always an argument going on in the literature about to what extent the environment plays a role. The estimates are that anywhere from 33 to 85 percent of cancers are influenced in some way by environmental chemicals. We can attribute about 10 percent of cancers to inheritance of bad genes. That doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t other genes we haven\u2019t found yet, but it\u2019s becoming less and less likely. Of the other 90 percent, some of them might be just random and you can\u2019t do anything about it, but I think more than half are due to some environmental exposure.<\/p>\n

How many chemicals do you think are registered for use in consumer products by the Environmental Protection Agency? About 84,000. About 2 percent have been tested to see if they are carcinogens. Of those 2 percent, about 30 percent are carcinogens. Say the overall carcinogen rate is 0.5 percent. That\u2019s about 400 carcinogens that we\u2019re exposed to all the time.<\/p>\n

Why not test the rest?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

That\u2019s exactly what Stefano Monti is doing, trying to find a very rapid, economical protocol to screen thousands of chemicals at once to get certain characteristics in a short time. Those characteristics go into a database, and then he identifies which set of characteristics is common to carcinogens and which is common to everything else that\u2019s not carcinogenic. He thinks he\u2019ll be able to identify a profile of a carcinogen.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem is actually getting the chemicals to test. It\u2019s taken us two years to collect 300 of them. And there\u2019s an added problem, which is that one might not be a carcinogen and another might not be a carcinogen, but together they might be carcinogenic.<\/p>\n

What else might the consortium research?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Gail Sonenshein has developed ways to detect cancer that may be growing anywhere by looking in blood for genetic pieces of the cancer. This is a very sensitive mechanism for detecting a cancer. She thinks that using this technique, she can determine whether somebody\u2019s been exposed to something carcinogenic\u2014the environmental factor. If Gail can come up with a way to test somebody\u2019s blood to be able to say, \u2018You were exposed to these five chemicals recently, and they\u2019ve caused this change,\u2019 that could be used by epidemiologists to say your disease might be caused by these chemicals.<\/p>\n

Will we find therapies or a cure in our lifetime?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I don\u2019t see that happening, but I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s because of the science. It\u2019s the economics of developing therapeutics. The other side is, there are 84,000 chemicals, and we all want to have a new car with a new car smell and we all want to sit in chairs that are flame-retardant. We\u2019re all passively agreeing that we want companies to make these chemicals; we all use Tupperware and all that stuff. So then it becomes an economic issue, to go after the chemical companies that could substitute something that\u2019s not carcinogenic. That\u2019s daunting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by:\u00a0Rich Barlow\u00a0| Source: BU Research Cancer researcher David Sherr is gunning for a disease that has upended his life. His wife died\u00a0from multiple myeloma 15 years ago. So when the Art beCAUSE Breast Cancer Foundation, a nonprofit supporting research into the environmental causes of breast cancer, approached him for ideas to accelerate progress, Sherr, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1429,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions\/1429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/compbiomed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}