Roughly one in eight women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime, and more than 220,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed in the United States every year. That makes it the second most common form of cancer among women (behind skin cancer) and the second most lethal (behind lung cancer).

As we recognize October as Breast Cancer Awareness month, the good news is that tremendous advances are being made in breast cancer research and Georgia Tech is heavily involved in that work. From October 24-27 4,000 biomedical engineers, faculty and students will gather for the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Annual Conference in Atlanta to share a wide variety of research in the fast growing field of biomedical engineering. Research tracks at this year's conference will focus mainly on cancer technology.

Here are some recent research highlights from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University in the areas of breast cancer research, imaging and personalized medicine.

Predicting Which Chemo Treatment Will Work Best

Melissa Kemp is using a computational modeling and systems-level approach to better understand the metabolic pathways of one of the most commonly used drugs for breast cancer treatment, doxorubicin. With this approach Dr. Kemp is able to predict how cancer cells from a patient are going to react to the doxorubicin chemotherapy based upon the individual's enzyme levels.

Ravi Bellamkonda's research group is developing a contrast agent to quantify breast-cancer blood-vessel leakiness in mice. This allows the researchers to predict how successful doxil treatment would be. "We can predict if the drug will or won't get there," he says. Based on these predictions, the researchers correctly predicted whether administering the drug would significantly shrink breast-cancer tumors in the mice.
 

Improving Diagnosis with Better Mammography Images

Brani Vidakovic is developing new methods to enhance the resolution of microcalcifications in digital mammograms. Cancerous cells cause microcalcifications that are usually very small (0.1mm to 1.0mm) and difficult to detect. By using a wavelet-transform algorithm, researchers are able to get improved visualization of smaller details. In a recent study the new wavelet procedures correctly identified cancerous tissue with 86% accuracy, compared to 55% from current methods of visual inspection. Dr. Vidakovic is working on this research in collaboration with Dr. Mary Newell, a radiologist at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute.
 

Quick Cancer Diagnosis from Biopsied Tissue

Manu Platt’s research group has developed a technique called multiplex cathepsin zymography that sensitively detects a class of protease biomarkers upregulated in many different types of cancers. They have used this on biopsied breast tissue to diagnose breast cancer with high sensitivity and specificity, and it does so in a relatively short time with the potential to reduce the patient waiting time for diagnosis result.
 

Understanding How Cancer Spreads

Susan Thomas and her research group are trying to understand metastasis when breast cancer cells leave the primary tumor and migrate to draining lymph nodes. They are also examining how lymph node metastasis influences the immune systems of patients. Their goal is to develop new ways to treat metastasis as well as develop immunotherapies to treat breast cancer.