Fighting the Triple Negative Threat

Oct. 15, 2007— -- Karen Esposito was nursing her 7-month-old daughter last April when she felt pain in one breast. "I thought it was just a clogged milk duct, so I put a hot pad on it and didn't think much more about it," says Esposito, 35.

When the pain didn't subside, she began to feel around her breast and discovered a lump the size of a pea.

A mammogram showed nothing, but when doctors did an ultrasound of her breast, they saw the tell-tale tumor spreading tentacles out like a star. A biopsy a few days later confirmed the cancer, and told the type: the aggressive tumor was so-called triple negative, which bears none of the common hormone markers, and is difficult to treat.

"When I found out, I felt so scared," says Esposito. "It's hard not knowing what makes it grow."

She has now undergone a dose of chemo, a double mastectomy, and radiation therapy to treat the cancer. As opposed to other types of breast cancer, triple negative tumors have long been a mystery to oncologists.

Now, some doctors are trying to shed light on how this kind of cancer grows.

"Triple negative breast cancers are very distinctive, not in what they have but in what they lack," says Dr. Angela DeMichele, assistant professor of medicine at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania. She explains that these cancers, which account for 10 to 15 percent of all breast cancers, have peculiarities.

"One of the problems is that these tend to be more aggressive tumors, and they are more resistant to standard therapies," says DeMichele. "They also tend to attack younger women, [under 40 years old] African-American women, and are more often linked to a breast cancer gene mutation. Despite advances in treating other breast cancers, we are only just now starting to unravel the problems of this type of tumor."

Since these cancers move quickly are often caught later, they are difficult to treat and have a higher mortality rate than other breast cancers. DeMichele has designed a new clinical trial, the first of its kind in breast cancer, using new drugs to treat triple negative tumors.