Rush's most productive cancer researchers were trained by renowned cancer physician Dr. Janet Wolter, whose 50-year career at Rush impacted cancer care for women everywhere. Philip Bonomi, MD has led this group of researchers as program director for a number of years, and is now joined by Howard Kaufman, MD, director of the Rush University Cancer Center.
Breast cancer is the most common malignancy among women worldwide. In the United States alone, 207,090 new cases and 39,840 deaths are estimated annually. This high rate of incidence makes breast cancer the leading cause of mortality from cancer in women. Treatments for most patients often include a combination of surgery, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, ionizing radiation or administration of biologicals. Despite recent improvements in breast cancer therapy, patients with advanced or metastatic disease continue to have a poor survival rate. Innovative therapies are needed to successfully treat primary breast tumors and prevent metastases.
The Piccolo Fund is currently supporting the research of Sasha Shafikhani, PhD, an accomplished cellular microbiologist at Rush. Dr. Shafikhani was selected among a pool of promising research proposals submitted by Rush clinicians and researchers. Dr. Shafikhani will tackle a perplexing reality in cancer therapy: why some cancers, while being targeted with cancer killing drugs, initiate a mechanism that immediately induces cancer cell growth in neighboring healthy cells, thus severely undermining the effectiveness of the original treatment.
With training at prestigious institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California at San Francisco, Dr. Shafikhani is eminently prepared to investigate whether breast cancer cells produce CrkI-based proliferation complexes in response to current therapies and to assess Pseudomonas aeruginosa toxins’ potential to enhance the efficacy current breast cancer treatments as a means to control compensatory proliferation signaling that can occur in dying cancer cells. Dr. Shafikhani’s central hypothesis is that Pseudomonas aeruginosa toxins possess unique properties that make them ideal candidates to be used alone or in combination to eradicate and prevent breast cancer metastases.
