The clinical management of breast cancer has been hampered by two persistent problems.
The first concerns chemotherapy. The choice of the drug cocktail is based on prior demonstration of efficacy in clinical trials. In the best of circumstances, a third of patients fail to respond to these cocktails. The clinical practice of antibiotic sensitivity/resistance testing prior to treatment in the case of infectious agents is a very successful strategy. This offers a compelling opportunity to develop methods for a priori testing of the drug effects on actual patient tumor specimen in-vitro.
The second issue is of metastasis. Breast cancer kills women almost exclusively because of the spread of the tumor cells to other sites such as the brain, lungs or liver. An intuitive understanding suggests that abilities to disengage from the original tumor mass are due to diminished adhesiveness and greater flexibility. We propose to examine tumor cells for these attributes using innovative nano-mechanobiology methods.