From Molecular Profiling to Diagnostics and Drug Targets: Integration for Precision Medicine in Breast Cancer

Breast cancer (BC) remains a worldwide health burden accounting for 15% of all cancer-related deaths. In 2019 in Qatar, BC accounted 17.0% of all diagnosed cancers and for 35.6% of cancers diagnosed in women. Spread of disease (metastasis) is the main cause of BC-related deaths but 74% of metastatic BC cases occur after initial diagnosis with non-metastatic, early-stage disease. Outcomes remain heterogenous even for women affected by the same subtype and stage of BC. These observations underline several overarching challenges in BC management, including the ability to: (1) Distinguish aggressive from indolent BC within the same subtype and stage (2) Predict the risk of disease progression at the time of first diagnosis (3) Replace ineffective interventions with effective ones (4) Determine how to stop cancer recurrence, locally or at distant sites The working hypothesis here is that these challenges require prognostic and predictive biomarkers to be used at the time of the first diagnosis to differentiate patients who do not benefit from current treatments and develop more effective treatments for them. Accordingly, the two main goals of this proposal are to: (1) Establish a research program that integrates clinical and preclinical research activities, to focus on biomarker discovery and developing in vitro diagnostics (IVDs) to allow Precision Medicine in BC. (2) Functionally investigate novel biomarkers to identify those which may be possible therapeutic targets in BC to meet the challenges of ineffective treatments. The strategy is to integrate Clinical & Preclinical Research to discover biomarkers and functional studies of novel biomarkers to identify those that may be possible therapeutic targets. In parallel to the prospective cohorts collected in QBRI’s BC Interdisciplinary Research Program (BC-IDRP), this proposal will collect retrospective samples with available survival information which will not accumulate for another 5-7 years in the BC-IDRP.

Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU)