Martine J. Piccart, MD, PhD

Understanding the molecular alterations in metastatic breast cancer that correlate with disease progression and/or therapeutic resistance.

Impact

Metastatic breast cancer (MBC) is one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality among women in the Western world. Dr. Piccart and her team of cancer experts and bio-informaticians are analyzing tumor tissue and blood samples collected from patients enrolled in the AURORA study, a flagship study of BCRF’s Evelyn H. Lauder Founder’s Fund for Metastatic Breast Cancer Research. She and her team hope to identify changes in tumor DNA that affect how the tumor responds to treatment to enable the discovery of new treatments, while improving the effectiveness of current therapies to extend the lives of women and men living with MBC.

Progress thus far

Dr. Piccart’s team is conducting deep molecular analysis of samples taken from the primary tumor and matched metastatic lesions of patients included in the AURORA molecular screening program. The AURORA trial has accrued more than 1,100 women and men from 60 hospitals across 11 EU countries. Preliminary analysis from the first 381 enrolled have identified several molecular features unique to metastatic lesions compared to matched primary cancers. Results from the study were presented at the breast meeting of European Society for Medical Oncology in 2019 and published in the journal Cancer Discovery in 2020.

What’s next

The team will continue the molecular characterization of the remaining patients included in AURORA. The study will be expanded to include patients with invasive lobular or triple-negative MBC, as well as those who were diagnosed with MBC many years after ostensibly curative therapy. Analyzing data from all AURORA patients will be essential to validate initial findings and to allow the study of rarer subtypes of breast cancer. This will enable a better understanding of the origin and evolution of metastatic breast cancer.