A group of collaborators, including researchers with the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, recently announced a discovery of a new gene signature for breast cancer.

The University of Alabama in Birmingham and Huntsman Cancer Institute were also part of the discovery. Results from the study were published in the journal Oncotarget last December.

The research was led by then graduate assistant Joy Agee McDaniel, PhD, who recently joined The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center as a postdoctoral fellow. McDaniel lost her best friend, who was only 24 years old, to breast cancer, and the loss motivated her to pursue graduate work at HudsonAlpha in breast cancer research, specifically triple negative breast cancer.

“My research is not only important to me because of my personal connection to breast cancer,” McDaniel said, “but also to men and women around the world because learning more about the basic biology of triple negative breast cancer will put us one step closer to developing better therapies and saving lives.”

In her time as a graduate assistant trainee in the Myers Lab at HudsonAlpha, McDaniel took a significant step toward meeting her goal. She and her colleagues discovered a new gene signature regulated by the transcription factor STAT3.

“What we found,” McDaniel said, “was that therapies that target STAT3 could prevent metastasis in triple negative breast cancer.” In metastasis, cancer cells break away from where they first formed, travel through the blood or lymph system, and form new tumors in other parts of the body.

Triple negative is one of the least treatable and most aggressive forms of breast cancer because it does not respond to hormonal therapies and is usually diagnosed at a later stage. McDaniel points out that while African American women have lower incidence of breast cancer diagnosis compared to white women, African American women have disproportionately lower survival rates from breast cancer.

“One out of every three breast cancer diagnoses in African American women is triple negative,” McDaniel said. “I want to help more women survive this devastating form of breast cancer.”

This research could lead to a new targeted therapy for triple negative breast cancer, which currently has no therapies tailored to treat its specific genetic makeup.