Groundbreaking grants awarded to Peter Mac for innovative breast cancer research
10 February 2025
The Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) has awarded Professor Sherene Loi and Associate Professor Shom Goel prestigious grants to further explore their breast cancer research endeavours.
Peter Mac clinician and researcher, Professor Loi, has been a BCRF grant recipient since 2017 with the latest funding helping her deep dive into two important areas.
“This critical funding will allow me to understand how the body’s immune system fights breast cancer and how we can tackle the challenge of treatment resistance,” Professor Loi said.
“New immunotherapy treatments are showing promising treatment results in high-grade hormone receptor-positive breast cancer, and at the same time we have observed that many younger patients have high levels of immune activity in their tumours, yet don’t always respond well to treatments.
“We want to study the immune cells of premenopausal women diagnosed with breast cancer using the wealth of data we have from a prior clinical trial.”
The research will analyse the immune system activity of these women to gain a better understanding of the complex immune landscape, as well as zoom in on individual immune cells at the single cell level.
“This analysis is critically important in helping us uncover specific genes or mutations that may determine how immune cells infiltrate breast tissue and which immune cells may be important for therapeutic targeting,” said Professor Loi.
“Lastly, we will explore genetic changes that occur over time that drive treatment resistance.”
Associate Professor Goel, also a clinician and researcher at Peter Mac with a special interest in breast cancer, will explore if hormone receptor negative breast cancers respond to a new class of drugs called CDK4/6 inhibitors that are routinely used in hormone positive breast cancer.
“CDK4/6 inhibitors were initially designed to stop cancer cells from dividing and are currently only used in the treatment of hormone receptor-positive breast cancers,” said Associate Professor Goel.
“Through our laboratory studies, we have discovered a second, unexpected effect of CDK4/6 inhibitors. Specifically, these drugs can change the function of immune cells (known as T cells) to boost their attack against cancer.
“With this research grant we hope to understand exactly how CDK4/6 inhibitors change the function of T cells in a way that benefits patients.”
Associate Professor Goel explained that it is believed these drugs act directly on cells known as "exhausted" T cells, ultimately boosting the quality and longevity of the immune response against cancers.
“Our research will explore this concept and we will also analyse a unique set of triple-negative breast cancer biopsy samples, taken before and after patients were treated with a CDK4/6 inhibitor, to help us determine if our laboratory observations can be validated in patients,” he said.
The BCRF is a US-based foundation dedicated to funding breast cancer research. They support the brightest researchers in the world.