[Colloquium] Seminar Announcement: BUILDING AN ONCOLOGY KNOWLEDGE BASE - Today!!

[Ninfa Mayorga]

Computation Institute Presentation

Speaker: Dr. Olufunmilayo (Funmi) I. Olopade M.D, FACP, Director,  
Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics & Global Health, Dept. Med. and  
Human Genetics
Date: April 14, 2011
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: The University of Chicago, Searle 240, 5735 S. Ellis Avenue,  
Argonne National Lab, TCS/Room 5C2 (5172)

BUILDING AN ONCOLOGY KNOWLEDGE BASE

With an estimated 1,152,161 new cases diagnosed worldwide per year, we  
are focusing our cancer control efforts on personalized approaches as  
a strategy for further reducing the morbidity and mortality associated  
with breast cancer. We and others have made the observation that young  
women of all racial/ethnic backgrounds and women with germline BRCA1  
mutations, are more likely to be diagnosed with high grade, ER- 
negative tumors, with their attendant aggressiveness and higher  
mortality rates. For more than a decade, we have worked on improving  
access to cancer risk assessment and genetic testing which has  
accelerated our ability to improve the survival of high-risk women  
through early detection and the ability to optimize multimodality  
therapy. However, too many women, especially African Americans on the  
Southside of Chicago are still being diagnosed with aggressive triple  
negative breast cancer and are in dire need of innovative treatment  
approaches. Within the University of Chicago Breast program, we are  
committed to finding ways to optimize therapeutic options for women at  
risk of dying from breast cancer. We have embarked on a large-scale  
effort to develop image based and tissue based biomarkers for risk  
assessment. For women diagnosed with breast cancer, whether inherited  
or sporadic, prognostic or predictive information is most useful when  
coupled with targeted therapeutic approaches, very few of which exist  
for the most aggressive breast cancers. The challenge for the future  
is to learn to use molecular characteristics of an individual and  
their tumor to improve detection and treatment, and ultimately to  
reduce mortality from breast cancer.

The unifying premise of integrative epidemiology is that the same  
genes that are implicated in cancer risk may also be involved in a  
person’s propensity to carcinogenic exposure and/or to modulation of  
therapeutic outcome. Based on this notion, we are constructing somatic  
and germline genetic profiles that can be used to assess risk, to  
individualize therapy, and to increase our understanding of the  
complex role of genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors in breast  
cancer etiology and progression. Our current work builds on resources  
of the Nigerian Breast Cancer Study and the University of Chicago  
Breast SPORE. The goal is to answer several overarching, related  
research questions including 1) Why are women of African ancestry more  
likely to develop triple-negative breast cancer? 2) What are the  
complex roles of genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors in  
breast cancer etiology and progression? 3) Can we build an oncology  
knowledge base using a robust web-based applic ation interface that  
integrates data from multiple sites and allows us to track any  
individual’s phenotypic data, genotypic data, clinical data and  
available bio-samples through a single computation platform. The  
project and resulting resources will become invaluable in identifying  
the multiple interacting genetic and non-genetic factors that have  
implications for early detection, prognosis and treatment of breast  
cancer in ALL women.