Description
This Karmanos Cancer Institute-funded study is focused on metastatic brain tumors (MBTs) that arise from primary breast or lung cancer. In general, these tumors do not respond to chemotherapy, and particularly, they do not respond to the target treatments that have been successful in treating the primary cancers. We are using high throughput genomic arrays to fully characterize the somatic coding mutations, copy number aberrations and correlated gene expression profiles in surgically-resected MBTs and matched primary tumors. Analyses of a statistically powerful number of specimens collected at our institute will be tailored for two outcomes: defining molecular markers to identify the subset of lung or breast cancer cells that will colonize the brain and determining targeted treatment modalities. By comparing the metastatic tumors from both lung and breast cancer (the two most common), we will identify a molecular signature that we expect will be unique to brain metastases. To achieve rapid clinical translation, our bioinformatic pipeline integrates knowledge-based queries to highlight oncogene activating mutations and report relevant clinical trials and potential for off-label repurposing of FDA-approved molecularly targeted drugs. This project is a collaboration with Aliccia Bollig-Fischer, PhD, in the Dept. of Oncology at the WSU School of Medicine.