High hopes for breast cancer research project

A major five-year collaboration between Ireland’s leading breast cancer researchers is expected to bear fruit from year one.

The Breast-Predict project will use biological information to develop more accurate and personalised treatments.

The Irish Cancer Society has announced that it is to invest €7.5m in the project over the five-year period, with the money coming entirely from fundraising.

More than 50 leading Irish and world experts in breast cancer research will be involved. It will be led by William Gallagher, professor of cancer biology at University College Dublin, who said the ultimate goal was to develop personalised medicine.

Prof Gallagher said that tailored therapy would be developed to treat individual patients based on the characteristics of their particular tumour.

He said every woman with a breast cancer diagnosis would be invited to participate in the project by allowing their tissues to be put in project’s bio-bank.

“We will be trying to find out how the disease arose; how the patient responded or didn’t respond to treatment,” he said.

A challenge in treating breast cancer is that in some cases the drugs work very well, and in others, they are not as effective.

Around 2,500 women in Ireland are diagnosed with breast cancer every year, and Prof Gallagher said they hoped to answer some key questions about the disease during the first year of the project.

In particular, they expected to have data in relation to the protective effect of low dose aspirin.

The project will also look at the positive impact statins, drugs used to treat cholesterol, have on hormone therapy, one of the main treatments for breast cancer.

He said the involvement of the all Ireland Co-Operative Oncology Research Group in the collaboration meant there would be no delay in bringing new drugs to cancer patients.

Prof Gallagher said he believed there needed to be a shift away from chemotherapy to more targeted treatments and combinations of targeted treatments.

A key factor, however, is the cost of drugs, at between €50,000 and €200,000 to treat each patient, because they were not always an effective treatment.

Prof Gallagher said the collaboration would allow researchers “narrow down” the patients who would benefit from the drugs.

Asked about finding a cure for breast cancer, he said he found ‘cure’ was always a difficult word to use.

He said nowadays cancer was treated more like a chronic disease rather than a “life or death” situation.

Head of research at the Irish Cancer Society, John Fitzpatrick said Breast-Predict was the first in a series of such centres that would lead to large-scale international collaborative projects in the oncology area.