News

Dr. Kelley Madden, BME Research Assistant Professor, and current member of the Brown Lab, has been awarded a two year, $232,943, grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The title of this R21 grant is 'Stress, Sympathetic Activation and Breast Tumor Growth and Metastasis and focuses on studies that will connect stress exposure and the stress hormones norepinephrine and epinephrine to cancer growth and spread in two mouse models of breast cancer. This work will provide immediate insight into how long-term stress exposure influences breast cancer growth and metastasis, and will lead to additional options for the treatment of breast cancer.

BME graduate student, Javier Lapeira Soto, a current member of the Brown Lab, has been awarded a 2010 Predoctoral Traineeship Award from the Department of Defense (DoD) Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP) based on the high scientific merit of his application, Breast Cancer Endothelial Cell Calcium Dynamics Using Two-Photon Microscopy, and its relevance to the programmatic goals of the BCRP.

Mercedes Szpunar, a 3^rd year graduate student in Dr. Edward Brown's lab received a travel and conference award from GWIS. Mercedes attended and presented a poster at the 2010 Days of Molecular Medicine Meeting in Stockholm, Sweden. View her Travel report followup.

Dr. Kelley Madden has received funding from the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program for a 2-year study that seeks to understand how an important stress pathway, the sympathetic nervous system, influences breast tumor growth and metastasis. Specifically, this study will determine if the sympathetic nervous system encourages growth of blood vessels into a tumor (angiogenesis). A unique aspect of this project is to determine if the sympathetic nervous system alters the effectiveness of therapy targeting and destroying tumor blood vessels (antiangiogenic therapy). Understanding how a stress pathway influences tumor growth will open the door to therapeutic options targeting the sympathetic nervous system. Importantly, therapies targeting sympathetic nervous system signaling pathways are already in use in the clinic for safe, chronic treatment of heart disease, offering the possibility of rapid clinical application of our findings. This project continues work that has been previously funded by the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester.