OHSU Team Joins Cancer Research Consortium; Receives Grant To Study Treatments For Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

PORTLAND, OR — Oregon Health & Science University on Thursday announced one of its research teams at the Knight Cancer Institute was selected to join a national Cancer Systems Biology Consortium as one of nine Research Centers — an honor which will also see the Knight Cancer Institute receive $9.2 million over five years from the National Cancer Institute.

As of December 2016, the other research centers included in the consortium are Stanford University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. According to NCI officials, the original hope was to provide grant funding to 10 research centers total.

Ultimately, the NCI plans to use the consortium of Research Centers to "bring together clinical and basic science cancer researchers with physician-scientists, engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists to tackle key questions in cancer biology from a novel point of view," OHSU spokeswoman Amanda Gibbs said in the Thursday statement.

Additionally, Gibbs said, each consortium Research Center "will support an outreach program to promote training in interdisciplinary science, disseminate important research findings to the community, and to engage the public in cancer systems biology research."

The project being formed by the OHSU Research Center team, Gibbs said, seeks to develop strategies to more effectively combat 'triple negative breast cancer,' which is currently treatment-resistant because it lacks the three primary receptors that fuel breast cancer growth — meaning cancer treatments that target the estrogen and progesterone receptors, as well as the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), are typically unsuccessful, often leaving chemotherapy as the only other option.

"Triple negative breast cancer is a particularly difficult form of the disease to treat," said Joe Gray, the principal investigator for the OHSU research team. "Our goals in the (Cancer Systems Biology Consortium) Research Center are to identify the mechanisms by which these cancers evolve and adapt to become resistant to treatment, and to develop new strategies to counter these mechanisms. Our multidisciplinary approach treats these cancers as adaptive systems that can be controlled using multiple drug combinations."

Gray is also director of the OHSU Center for Spatial Systems Biomedicine and associate director for biophysical oncology at the Knight Cancer Institute.

According to Gibbs, the other principal investigators on the OHSU team are:

• Rosalie Sears, professor of molecular and medical genetics in the OHSU School of Medicine and a senior member of the Knight Cancer Institute;
• Claire Tomlin, the Charles A. Desoer Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley; and
• Adam Margolin, associate professor of biomedical engineering and director of computational biology in the OHSU School of Medicine and the Knight Cancer Institute.

Altogether, including the principal investigators, the OHSU Research Center team will be comprised of 15 people.

Sage Bionetworks in Seattle is expected to serve as the consortium’s Coordinating Center, Gibbs said, by not only facilitating data and resource sharing but also collaborative scientific activities across the Research Centers. Sage Bionetworks will also assist with two new research projects, she said.

"Cancer is a complex disease and it challenges our traditional approaches, making it hard to predict tumor growth and drug response," said Daniel Gallahan, deputy director of NCI's Division of Cancer Biology. "Cancer systems biologists embrace that complexity and use many different types of data to build mathematical models that allow us to make predictions about whether a tumor will metastasize or what drug combinations will be effective."

For more information, visit the project website.

Photo Courtesy: Chris Hornbecher, OHSU