Saris Cycling Group announces the Pink Bones™ program to benefit breast cancer research at the UW Carbone Cancer Center.

For more details about Saris Cycling Group, its outlets, and the Pink Bones™ program, please visit www.saris.com.

Related article from the Capital Times: Pink bicycle rack sales aid breast cancer fight

A Leader in Breast Cancer Research

The UW Carbone Cancer Center is leading a number of cutting-edge breast cancer research initiatives. Some of the current breast cancer research endeavors include:

• Investigators are looking at elderly patients newly diagnosed with breast cancer to better understand how non-cancer health problems interact with breast cancer treatment. With the aging population it will be extremely important to develop sensitive and appropriate approaches to cancer in the elderly.

• The increased use of estrogen reduction approaches as with aromatase inhibitors highlights the need for greater understanding of bone health in breast cancer survivors. The ongoing randomized Cancer Center trial assessing zoledronate in breast cancer patients without metastatic disease will provide important guidance.

• Imaging of dense breast tissue - especially in post-menopausal women - what does it mean to have high density?  Studies using culture models and mouse models aim to recreate this risk factor and test what effect high matrix density has on breast epithelial cells, and what effect that has on how and when they transform. (Patricia Keely, PhD - Paolo Provenzano, PhD)

• Factors that affect the metabolism of E-cadherin - this cell surface molecule glues cells together and stops them from growing, and from migrating away from the rest of the cells.  Almost all breast tumors do not have E-cadherin function.  At UW, we are looking at a completely new pathway for removing E-cadherin from the cell surface, involving lipid metabolising enzymes that traffic the E-cadherin off and on the plasma membrane. (Richard Anderson, PhD)

• Somatic breast stem cells - are they the source of tumors?  Adult stem cells are immortal, and grow without some of the controls used for the majority of cells in your body.  Are they subverted to be tumor precursors, and if so, do they become cancer stem cells?  New data suggests that cancer stem cells do not respond to normal chemotherapeutics, and could be the source of tumors recurrence.  Can we model this disease and develop new chemotherapeutics that will tackle the cancer stem cells? (Caroline Alexander, PhD)

• High levels of estrogen receptor expression maintain tumor growth, and it is this feature that makes ER+ve tumors susceptible to anti-estrogenic compounds like aromatase inhibitors and tamoxifen.  However, in some cases, ER+ve tumors are not responsive.  Here at UW we are studying some aspects of ER regulation that might explain this, like misregulated protein production and competition with related molecules. (Elaine Alarid, PhD; Janet Mertz, PhD; Wei Xu, PhD)

• The majority of breast cancer patients do not have the main known susceptibility genes, Brca1 and 2, but instead the disease is clearly dominated by combinations of lower risk genes, that are harder to identify in humans by genetic mapping.  At UW, we have a huge experiment in rat genetics (rats model human disease very well), that has enabled the identification of several of these kinds of genetic loci, together with their human homologs.  This opens the door to more accurate genetic counseling in the future. (Michael Gould, PhD)

• Most breast cancer patients do not die from their primary disease, but from metastasis.  During progression, the primary genetic lesions do not matter as much as the environmental response to those cells.  The cells that surround the tumor precursors can react by producing factors that enable rapid growth and delamination/circulation of primary epithelial cells.  If we can understand the molecules that are produced by these so-called "stromal" cells, we can intervene in the most dangerous stage of the disease.  (Andreas Friedl, MD; Caroline Alexander, PhD).