Obesity and Breast Cancer
Breast cancer (BC) is the most common cancer among women, representing 30% of all newly diagnosed cancers. Obesity is a significant risk factor for BC incidence and progression. However, how obesity accelerates breast cancer remains unclear, in part because obesity causes many complex changes in the body, such as increased adiposity and systemic metabolic alterations that can each directly influence BC growth. Consequently, tumors in patients with obesity are exposed to a distinct nutrient environment, including high levels of circulating lipids
Our Goal is to elucidate how changes in nutrition and adipose tissue biology influence lipid metabolism in breast cancer cells, with the ultimate aim of identifying metabolic vulnerabilities that can be targeted to improve cancer outcomes.
Our Research & Discoveries:
- Elevated serum lipids are sufficient to accelerate E0771 growth in both dietary and genetic mouse models of hyperlipidemia
- Systemic lipid lowering prevents the obesity-accelerated growth of E0771 tumors
- Weight Loss attenuates obesity-accelerated E0771 tumor growth
- Leverage the ORIEN consortium to identify differences in gene expressions across human breast cancer tumor samples in association with obesity, breast cancer subtypes clinical parameters, and patient history using differential expression analysis, gene expressions pathway analysis, and non-parametrical statistical tests.
Our research project is made possible by our collaborative team, which brings together diverse expertise to investigate how nutrition and adipose tissue biology influence cancer cell lipid metabolism. This project is a collaboration with the Hilgendorf Lab, whose expertise in adipose tissue biology enables us to explore this question using complementary and interdisciplinary perspectives.
Figure 1 – Heatmap of differentially expressed genes across human BC tumor samples from ORIEN aggregated by BMI categories.