Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) progresses independent of estrogen, progesterone and Her2/Neu signaling, hence being non-responsive to targeted treatment approaches that have dramatically improved patient survival rates over the past few decades. This form of cancer depends on standard of care chemotherapy, radiation and surgery; a protocol which is suboptimal for 60% of this population leading to relapse within the first 3-5 years following treatment. Studies in the Porter lab and others suggest that the addition of carboplatin (Ca) to chemotherapy can improve survival for a subset of patients. The Porter lab has data supporting that elevation of select cell cycle drivers may be indicative of poor response to chemotherapy + Ca.

This study aims to reveal new treatment options for those patients who have poor outcomes to latest chemotherapy treatment approaches. Our team has set up a translational platform to coordinate the collection of tissue samples for both protein and gene expression analysis along with patient clinical data. Using samples already collected from 90 TNBC patients, we will conduct RNA analysis for these patients and compare data with results from Tissue Microarray Analysis (TMA) and 10 years of clinical follow up data.