Advanced Breast Cancer Translational Laboratory

Group leader

Ana Santos Almeida

Team Leader

The aim of the Advanced Breast Cancer Translational Laboratory is to reduce the incidence and mortality of Metastatic Breast Cancer.

In Portugal, in 2020, almost 7000 women were diagnosed with breast cancer and 1800 died of the disease.

Breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease with different subtypes that differ in key genetic alterations, therapeutic strategies and clinical prognosis. These are largely conditioned by the metastatic behavior of the cancer. The efficacy of cancer treatments, the evolution to metastatic breast cancer, and/or the survival of the patients is significantly affected when the cancer is detected at later stages.

Thus, the primary goal of the lab is to increase early-stage detection, at stage I of cancer development, from 30% to 70% within the next 10 years.

At the same time, treatment of breast cancer, in particular metastatic disease, raises many challenges due to resistance to available therapies.

The second goal of the lab is to develop and implement custom-made tests that will allow the identification of biomarkers and phenotypic features predisposing to metastatic breast cancer and therapy resistance.

Understanding disease progression at early-diagnosis stage will enable prediction of the therapy response and monitoring therapeutic response throughout the treatment course.

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