The Susan G. Komen More Than Pink Walk in Pittsburgh was a great success! A sunny day with thousands of attendees. Thanks to all of the organizers and sponsors. Our team – the Magee-Hillman Breast Cancer Warriors was one of the top fundraisers. We were happy to see Natera sponsoring the event; Their booth was always busy! We spent most of the time at the Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC booth which was never quiet.
The Institute for Precision Medicine hosted the NCI-BCRF-Komen workshop on “Patient-Derived Breast Cancer Organoids: Challenges & Opportunities” on May 21-22, 2025 at The Assembly in Pittsburgh, PA.
The meeting was co-organized by myself, Sandra Demaria, Ariella Hanker, and Senthil Muthuswamy.
We brought together 45 investigators to discuss the state-of-the-art in PDO research and gaps that present barriers to progress.
The lively event raised several excellent points about how PDOs are credentialed and used in research. In particular, their use in predicting patient response to therapy (e.g., co-clinical trials) was a hotly discussed topic.
The National Institutes of Health recently promoted organoid models to reduce the reliance on animal models, and we hope that these novel alternative metholodologies will provide new avenues for precision medicine.
We thank The Breast Cancer Research Foundation and Susan G. Komen for sponsoring the workshop and advocates Bob Riter and Jamie LaScala who participated in a panel discussion on obtaining tissue for research.
Outcomes and deliverables of the workshop will be a white paper on best practices in breast cancer PDO research and hopefully a new network that can share PDO and data and accelerate this research.
If you are interested in participating in the Breast Organoid Working Group (BOWG) contact Dr. Adrian Lee.
Julia Foldi MD and colleagues from the Lee-Oesterreich laboratory collaborated with Natera Inc to report on retrospective analysis of real-world data in 66 patients with metastatic ILC using a clinically validated, personalized, tumor-informed ctDNA assay (Signatera). Serial ctDNA testing in patients with mILC is feasible and may enable personalized surveillance and real-time therapeutic monitoring.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40324116
Graduate student Abdalla Wedn has been chosen to receive an ASPET Young Scientist Travel Award to attend the 19th World Congress of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology. The meeting is scheduled to take place July 2-7, 2023 in Glasgow, Scotland.
We are pleased to introduce the EstroGene Project -a comprehensive multi-omic NGS database focusing on estrogen receptor function in breast cancer. It aims to document and integrate the majority of publicly available estrogen-stimulated next generation sequencing data sets (including RNA-seq, microarray, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, ChIA-PET, Hi-C, GRO-seq, etc), and establish a comprehensive database to allow users’ customized data mining and visualization. We have curated 136 published NGS data sets from 2004-2022 across 19 breast cancer cell lines and generated a browser for simplified queries.
Features of EstroGene:
-A uniformly processed and crowd-sourced multi-omic database with detailed experimental documentation summary.
-A browser allowing single gene-based visualization of E2-induced expressional changes and ER proximal binding at users’ selected genes of interest.
-A browser supporting statistical cutoff-based gene list query function to export genes regulated by E2 under users’ defined contexts.
-An ER and breast cancer-centered database for dissecting the biological and technical diversity and variation of estrogen receptor-relevant NGS experiments and the confound ER regulomes in breast cancer.
We have summarized all of the curated datasets in this google form. We are crowd-sourcing additional datasets that may not be available in the public domain but are available within laboratories. If you have such a dataset please don’t hesitate to fill in the google form and we will contact you back.
We would appreciate it if you could operate the website and give us feedbacks to improve it and continue notify us about new data sets via the google form.
The BioRxiv manuscript of this project will be deposit after receiving feedbacks from the research community!
For any queries please email Nadine Ryan (ryann@upmc.edu)
Research publication: Clinicopathological Features and Outcomes Comparing Patients With Invasive Ductal and Lobular Breast Cancer
Multi-institutional study of #lobular cancer led by my long-term collaborator @oesterreichs. ILC has worse long-term outcomes than IDC – lots more research to be done. @LobularIreland @LobularBCUK @LobularBCA @LobularResearch @BCRFcure @SusanGKomen #bcsm pic.twitter.com/4tXz7UnOtd
— Adrian Lee (@Adrianvlee) October 16, 2022
