48 | OCTOBER 31 • 2019
continued on page 50
A
bout 2.1 million
women worldwide
developed breast can-
cer in 2018, according to the
World Health Organization.
Last year also saw some
627,000 fatalities due to breast
cancer — nearly all because
their cancer had spread to dis-
tant organs.
Israeli researcher Neta Erez
is trying to find out how the
cancer spreads in a bid to stop
it.
“Most studies are still
done on the primary tumor,
but that’
s not what kills the
patient,” Erez said. “If we can
intervene at an early stage, we
may be able to prevent metas-
tasis.”
If successful, this could lead
to significant improvements in
cancer treatment and surviv-
ability.
Erez, chairwoman of the
Department of Pathology at
Tel Aviv University’
s Sackler
Faculty of Medicine, is one of
many Israeli cancer specialists
studying breast cancer, which
strikes Ashkenazi Jewish
women at three times the rate
of the general population.
That’
s because Ashkenazi
women are much more like-
ly to carry mutations in the
BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that
lead to extremely high rates of
developing cancer.
Even so, 99 percent of breast
cancer patients whose tumors
are diagnosed and removed
at an early stage are still alive
after five years. That five-year
survival rate drops to 92 per-
cent if the tumor reaches Stage
1 classification and drops to
just 14 percent for patients
who have the Stage 4 disease.
The key to improved out-
comes, Erez says, is to stop the
disease from spreading.
“We no longer look at
tumors as a bunch of cancer
cells, but as multicellular
organs. They actually recruit
and hijack lots of so-called
normal cells that then become
part of the tumor,” she said.
“We’
re trying to understand
the interactions and relation-
ships between those tumor
cells and the normal cells that
get hijacked.”
October was Breast Cancer
Awareness Month. In the
United States, where breast
cancer is the most common
cancer among women, there
were countless fundraising
events, marches for cures and
other efforts to raise money
for research to fight the dis-
ease.
The Israel Cancer Research
Fund (ICRF), which raises
money in the United States
for cancer research at Israeli
universities, hospitals and
other institutions, has long
been a funder of breast cancer
research. Erez is one of the
organization’
s grant recipients.
So is Dr. Gad Rennert,
director of the Clalit National
Israeli Cancer Control Center
in Haifa, who is studying
why breast cancer is so prev-
alent among pre-menopausal
women under age 45.
“Most cancers develop over
a pretty long period, maybe
10 to 15 years,” said Rennert,
whose lab is the recipient of
a $420,000, three-year ICRF
grant split evenly between the
City of Hope Cancer Center
in Los Angeles and his agency.
“So, when a woman develops
cancer at 35, you’
ve got to
wonder what happened to her
at age 25.”
Rennert’
s project is ana-
lyzing the DNA of newly
diagnosed young women
with breast cancer — Stage
1 patients up to 35 years old
and Stage 2 patients up to 45
— and testing their DNA for
changes in about 130 genes
known to be involved in the
development of breast cancer.
“I don’
t have Phase 2 results
yet, but in Phase 1 we iden-
tified another 10 percent of
women with mutations in
other genes or rare mutations
in BRCA,” he said. “We’
re try-
Israeli Research
Health | Israel’s role
Scientists study how breast
cancer spreads in search
of a cure.
LARRY LUXNER JTA
The five-year survival rate
for breast cancer is 99
percent if caught in an early
stage, but just 14 percent
for patients diagnosed with
Stage 4 of the disease.