Meet Our Researchers

                            Janice Lu, MD PhD & Wen-Tien Chen, PhD
Janice Lu, MD PhD                        Bringing together Clinical & Laboratory Research

In our last issue we learned about the Phase I & Phase II testing underway for the new drug, CPI-613, developed by Dr. Bingham.  New drugs are not the only area in which our research is being done.  There are clinical applications, surgical applications, chemotherapy applications, the software that drives the mammography and lab technology, and many more avenues of research being done at Stony Brook to help with prevention, detection and finding a cure. 

This article will highlight one of our research grants led by Janice Lu, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Director, Medical Breast Oncology, SUNY at Stony Brook, and Dr. Wen-Tien Chen, PhD, Research Professor of Medicine; Director of Metastasis Research Laboratory, SUNY at Stony Brook.  The work of Dr. Lu and Dr. Chen may one day lead to new treatment options for breast cancer patients. 

Dr. Lu works with Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) trying to discover if one day physicians will be able to predict survival and treatment options from the number of CTCs found in  blood and lymph vessels.  CTCs are cells that have escaped from the tumor and are circulating in the blood of the patient.  Working closely with Dr. Lu, Dr. Chen developed new a technology that allows researchers to detect the CTCs at a level that is 10 – 100 times more sensitive then the current method, thus allowing them to study the levels in stage I, II, & III breast cancer patients not just late stages.  This new detection method allows researchers to find CTCs in over half of the women studied with early stage breast cancer.
Prior to this new technology, CTCs could only be detected in 30% of the women tested with aggressive late stage breast cancer.  A 2005 study* of 200 women with spreading breast cancer found that women with <5 CTCs/7.5 ml have a longer life expectancy.  In fact our current study (Lu and Chen study) has shown that of the 60 women studied there were no deaths or additional metastases in women with <5CTCs/7.5 ml over a period of 80 months. 
The current study which includes early stage breast cancer has found a correlation between CTCs and survival outcomes.  It has shown that with Chemotherapy the number of CTCs is reduced by 40%.  What we may see in the future is the ability to refine the treatment decisions for women with metastatic and early stage breast cancer.  For instance, clinicians may be able to treat women with low CTCs less aggressively in the future.

*Cristofanelli et al., NEJM 2005

Wen-Tien Chen, PhD