Research Partnership Yields New Insights into Breast Cancer Tumors

As part of a decade-long partnership, Margarida Barroso, PhD from Albany Medical College and Xavier Intes, PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have collaborated on multiple breast cancer research studies, including on the development of imaging platforms to track drug delivery, therapeutic efficacy, and tumor resistance over time, and, more recently, exploring the potential of artificial intelligence to improve treatments.

In their latest study, published in the journal Advanced Science, they used a cutting-edge molecular imaging technique to measure how much of the drug trastuzumab (TZM) penetrated HER2-positive breast cancer tumors with different microenvironments, allowing them to quantify the drug’s efficacy.

TZM is a monoclonal antibody used to treat HER2-positive breast tumors, but only 40 to 60 percent of the patients respond to TZM therapy and the disease recurs in 15 to 20 percent of breast cancer patients.

“How much of a drug is able to penetrate a tumor is influenced by the tumor’s microenvironment, which can explain why some tumors don’t respond to treatment while others do,” said Dr. Barroso, professor in Albany Medical College’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, who co-led the study with Dr. Intes, professor in Rensselaer’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.

The scientists used a non-invasive imaging technique called near-infrared fluorescence lifetime Förster resonance energy transfer to measure the amount of TZM in breast cancer tumor cells and to see how it was distributed within those cells, which had been transplanted from a human cell line into mouse models. The tumor cells varied in their physical characteristics, how they function, and aggressiveness.

“As we continue to co-develop these unique advanced imaging techniques, we are uncovering more details about the tumor’s behavior and discovering new biomarkers that correlate to treatment response,” said Dr. Intes. “These new methodologies are poised to find applications in numerous precision medicine fields, including targeted drug development, optical guided surgery and/or immunotherapy regimen selection.”

While additional studies are needed, the scientists hope that this type of advanced imaging could become a powerful analytical tool to monitor the delivery of new, targeted antibody drugs and to facilitate the therapeutic management of breast cancer.