Work on brain metastases from breast cancer wins Hologic Women's Health Award

The identification of a protein that is decisive for the brain metastasis of breast cancer allowed Ana Sofia Ribeiro to win the first edition of the Hologic Women's Health Award 2023, worth 12 thousand euros. With this new biomarker, it will be easier to predict the risk of developing metastases early, better control the disease, and find new personalized therapies.

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy and the leading cause of death in women due to distant metastases in bone, lung, liver and brain. More recent data, says Ana Sofia Ribeiro, “show that brain metastasis has been increasing and has the worst survival rates among patients with metastatic breast cancer”. This urgent need to identify predictive biomarkers that help early identify patients who are more likely to develop metastatic breast cancer, led the researcher to focus on the study of tumor secretome, that is, everything that is released by tumor cells into the bloodstream and that “may be involved in the metastasis process”.

Following this research in the “Cancer Metastasis” group, led by Joana Paredes, Ana Sofia Ribeiro identified the VGF protein as one of the key molecules in this brain metastasis process, which means that it can be an excellent predictive and prognostic biomarker. for brain metastases in women with breast cancer.

As the i3S researcher explains, “early detection allows for more effective treatment with better results. Almost 98% of women diagnosed with breast cancer in the early stages have a significantly longer survival compared to the 30% of patients diagnosed in the more advanced stages”. With this work “we anticipate a significant and innovative approach to face this deadly condition, with a view to improving diagnosis and therapy for women with brain metastatic breast cancer”.

For the president of the jury of the Hologic Saúde da Mulher Award, Maria do Carmo Fonseca, “the jury unanimously selected this project because it is an innovative and very well-founded research work, focused on the brain metastasis of breast cancer”. Currently “there are no effective treatments for breast cancers that give rise to metastases in the brain, so the award-winning work has the potential to generate knowledge of great relevance for the medical follow-up of women with this type of cancer”. The prize will allow Ana Sofia Ribeiro to carry out more laboratory experiments, thus increasing her competitiveness in the process of attracting additional funds needed to demonstrate the clinical applicability of the results.