- Friday, February 24, 2023
- 2:00 PM–2:50 PM
- SB 010
Justin Colacino of University of Michigan discusses epidemiologically informed toxicology to understand environmental impacts on aggressive breast cancers and cancer disparities.
Triple negative breast cancers are a difficult to treat type of cancer with poorly understood etiology. These tumors are characterized by a lack of expression of estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, and human epidermal growth factor receptor and have the worst overall survival of all breast cancer subtypes. African American women are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with this type of cancer. As aggressive triple negative breast cancers form, they acquire the Hallmarks of Cancer including sustained proliferative signaling, the activation of invasion and metastasis pathways, immortality, and the evasion of growth suppression, the reactivation of stem cell pathways, and the acquisition of cellular plasticity. How environmental factors may impact the development of triple negative breast cancers remains poorly understood. Here, I will present our strategy for evaluating chemical impacts on triple negative breast cancers and cancer disparities. Chemicals with high levels of exposure and exposure disparities are quantified in human population chemical biomonitoring studies. These prioritized chemicals are then evaluated for their impacts on breast cancer associated pathways at human relevant doses using a set of orthogonal in situ, in vitro, and in vivo assays, including Cell Painting and high throughput transcriptomics. I will present data identifying chemicals with putative links to aggressive breast cancers and discuss overcoming key challenges in the field of epidemiologically informed toxicology to determine environmental links to cancer.
