How We Will End Breast Cancer in Our Lifetime
Most of the great leaps forward in medicine have come from creative thinkers outside of the mainstream who are willing to buck the status quo and try something new. The Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation is dedicated to fostering that path.
Our Foundation believes that the intraductal approach to breast research is what will vault us to a new level of success in preventing breast cancer. That is why we focus our own research efforts on this approach. And it is why we provide pilot grants to researchers who are using the intraductal approach to expand our knowledge of the breast and breast cancer.
To eradicate breast cancer we need to begin where breast cancer begins—in the breast ducts. The intraductal approach uses new technologies, such as catheters and scopes that can be threaded through the nipple into the milk duct, that provide new access to these ducts. It also utilizes ductal lavage, an FDA-approved clinical procedure to wash out the cells in a duct, that has been able to detect atypical, presumably precancerous cells. While the subjectivity of cellular evaluation has limited the current clinical utility of ductal lavage, interest in the technique as a research tool is growing.
The intraductal approach allows us to examine and understand the conditions inside the breast duct that support or block the development of cancer. Early studies have suggested that estrogen levels in the duct fluid are significantly higher than they are in the blood. The breast appears to have the ability to make its own estrogen. Could this be what differentiates high-risk women from those at low risk? We don't yet know. How does the normal, non-breastfeeding breast work? What is absorbed and concentrated into the breast ducts? Why do the cells that line the milk ducts become cancerous in some women? We don't yet know. Are the elusive carcinogens that are responsible for breast cancer in the ductal fluid bathing the very cells at risk? We don't yet know. But by utilizing the intraductal approach, we have the ability to find out.
Our goal: A Pap-smear model for breast cancer. Understanding how the breast works should help us determine how to reverse early cancerous changes. We envision that—within our lifetime—research utilizing the intraductal approach will lead to the identification of a blood or fluid test that can screen for cells that are just "thinking" about becoming cancerous some day. We will know which duct those cells came from, and that duct will be treated with an agent, through the nipple. This will be true prevention, and the beginning of the end of breast cancer as we know it today.
Learn more about the intraductal approach and read reports from the Foundation's biennial International Symposium on the Intraductal Approach to Breast Cancer.
Learn more about the research the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation is conducting to bring us to the beginning of the end of breast cancer.
Learn more about the pilot grants the Foundation has given to fund promising research using the intraductal approach.
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