Game Changer: Dr. Deborah Anderson on Triple Negative Breast Cancer

Researchers Under the Scope

Dr. Deborah Anderson has spent her career as a biochemist and cancer cell biologist pinning down elusive targets.

Now she’s made a breakthrough in one of the world’s most swift-moving and aggressive cancers: triple negative breast cancer.

This form of the disease affects 15 to 20 per cent of women diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s , and is often more prevalent in young women, with a disproportionate number of Black and Latina women. Unlike other forms of breast cancer, it’s not fuelled by the hormones estrogen and progesterone, or by the HER2 protein — and so does not respond to typical hormonal therapies

For Anderson, Director of Research at the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency, unraveling biochemical mysteries has always been a passion.

During her third year as a pre-med student at the University of Manitoba, she switched to an honours biochemistry program.

“I got to learn more about things like the fundamental processes going on in cells, controlling cell functions, cell behaviour, and this just reinforced my interest and love of science and I was hooked,” said Anderson.

After completing her doctoral studies, she went on to work in laboratory of the late Tony Pawson — a scientist Nature magazine calls ‘one of the most extraordinarily gifted and celebrated molecular and cellular biologists of our time.’

“We were just starting to learn how to make controlled, known mutations, to sort of probe what those different mutations would do to the protein that they were in,” said Anderson.

“Now you can sequence the whole genome — 20,000 genes and more in a day for a thousand dollars. So the technology has definitely changed what we can do and how fast we can do it.”

Over the past decade, Anderson and her research team have looked at CREB3L1, a protein that sits on a person’s DNA and helps decide whether or not to switch on the genes that stop cancer from spreading.

CREB3L1 is missing inside metastatic cancer cells, leading Anderson to question which proteins are active there instead.

“This is a common thing in cancer where things that put on the brakes are often missing,” Anderson said.

She and a team of six researchers have now identified a protein that promotes metastasis — one that’s often observed in triple negative breast cancer. It has no natural inhibitors, and its three-dimensional folded structure is already mapped out.

In this episode, she explains the way that's led to therapeutic breakthroughs, and new compounds which could be 'game-changers'.

“Patients often ask themselves, is this really worth it to go through all this for the time that it buys me? And if we could offer patients something that was less cytotoxic, that's still providing them with improved survival and benefit in terms of disease control — that would be huge.”

Dr. Anderson and her team are also looking at existing pharmaceuticals approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — and whether any of them are effective against triple negative breast cancer cells.

To date, she said four drugs look promising, particularly in combination with existing chemotherapy drugs. Because they’re already FDA-approved, it’s a far less onerous process to eventually get them to oncologists and their patients.