| Grant number: | 19/04314-6 |
| Support type: | Regular Research Grants |
| Duration: | August 01, 2019 - July 31, 2021 |
| Field of knowledge: | Health Sciences - Medicine |
| Principal Investigator: | Andréia de Melo Porcari |
| Grantee: | Andréia de Melo Porcari |
| Home Institution: | Universidade São Francisco (USF). Campus Bragança Paulista. Bragança Paulista , SP, Brazil |
| Assoc. researchers: | Lívia Schiavinato Eberlin ; Sophie Françoise Mauricette Derchain |
| Associated scholarship(s): | 20/01941-7 - Training in handling biological samples and approaching patients to collect Biobank., BP.TT |
Abstract
Breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease that encompass different histological types and molecular subtypes and it is the main cancer type among women. One of the histological types, the ductal one, accounts for ~80% of the cases and it is basically classified in luminal and non-luminal subtypes. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy is usually employed as treatment in these cases, aiming the reduction of the tumor area and damages caused by tumor's removal. Nonetheless, ~50% of the women submitted to this treatment do not respond to the neoadjuvant treatment. The investigation over global metabolic alterations among cancer cells that are sensitive and resistant to chemotherapy is still needed and, such a research may result in a predictive test grounded in mass spectrometry-based metabolomics which could predict patient outcome to chemotherapy before her/his exposure to such an undesired treatment, resulting in a personalized medicine strategy aiming at the use of plasma tests, with clear potential for clinical practice. This project aims at characterizing the metabolome of chemotherapy-resistant and -sensitive patients based on two approaches: (i) tumor tissue and tumor bed tissue from patients classified as good and bad responders and (ii) serum of patients before and after their exposure to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. We aim at deepening the knowledge of biochemical pathways that take place in the resistance mechanisms. Our ultimate objective is to find biomarkers, accessible through serum analysis, that could indicate which patients will be benefited from the neoadjuvant chemotherapy and which will not. Moreover, we aim at the metabolic characterization of the different molecular subtypes of ductal breast cancer and we will try to understand the effects of drug resistance in these different subtypes. This project corroborates with the investments of São Francisco University that made possible to set up and equip a new multi-users laboratory for mass spectrometry and to hire the proponent of this project. We could also establish partnerships with the women's hospital CAISM - UNICAMP and with the University of Texas, thus allowing the appropriate collection of samples and the clinical and technological backgrounds needed to achieve unique results. (AU)