Joe W. Gray, PHD, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Innovator Award:

So this is the Innovator Award in the Breast Cancer Research Program and the goal of this project is to try to address the fact that in our opinion breast cancer screening strategies aren't doing as well at detecting the metastasis-prone breast cancers and therefore reducing mortality. It's not doing as well as we would like to have happen, and so our goal here is to try to develop improved breast cancer detection strategies based both looking at the anatomy and looking at histopathological sections.

The approach that we are taking here is to try to develop new contrast reagents that will allow us to identify breast cancer subtypes that we think are going to be metastasis prone. So my laboratory over the last decade has been engaged in trying to understand what the molecular signatures of invasion-prone breast cancers actually are.

We've now identified a number of proteins that we think are specifically expressed in two sub-populations of breast cancer that are associated with metastasis. One of them is the baseless subtype cancer and the other is a luminal subtype cancer in which the tumors have amplified regions of the genome. So we've got multiple molecular markers for each of those subtypes and what we are trying to do now is to actually make contrast reagents that we can use to improve imaging.

The kind of research that we are doing here is bringing together people in the fields of oncology, surgery, biophysics, material science, engineering, mathematics -- I mean its a very multidisciplinary project and I personally believe that some of the problems that we are dealing with now like this one are sufficiently complicated that one lab or one person really can't handle the breadth of science needed to do it. So I believe that much of the future of real translational research is going to require these multidisciplinary teams.