Karen Liby, PhD

2009-2010 BCRF Project:
Co-investigator: Michael Sporn, MD, Dartmouth Medical School

There is a continuing need to devise new approaches to prevent breast cancer. This need is particularly compelling for the clinical management of women who have been newly diagnosed as carriers of BRCA mutations, and are therefore at exceptionally high risk for development of estrogen receptor (ER)-negative breast cancer. At present, there are no ideal choices for these women. Bilateral prophylactic mastectomy, which can reduce risk by 90%, is one option, but it is certainly not an acceptable one from a personal perspective. Chemoprevention that would be highly effective and acceptable for use for prevention of aggressive, ER-negative breast cancer in pre-menopausal women has yet to be developed.

Thus, the immediate goal of this project is to investigate promising new agents for preventing ER-negative breast cancer and to study their molecular and cellular mechanisms of action in this regard. The selection of new agents by Drs. Sporn and Liby at Dartmouth is based on drugs that are in advanced stages of pre-clinical development and therefore have the best possible chances for actual clinical implementation, if a high degree of efficacy and safety can be demonstrated in the studies they propose. Thus, the long-term goal of this project is to improve quality of life for women at exceptionally high risk for developing breast cancer by finding an effective and safe preventive drug regimen that would eliminate the need for bilateral prophylactic mastectomy. A similar strategy for chemoprevention of heart attacks and strokes in people at high risk, using cholesterol-lowering drugs (statins) and anti-platelet agents (aspirin), is widely accepted and effective.

Mid-Year Progress Report:
During the past six months Drs. Sporn and Liby have found that several new chemopreventive agents are effective drugs for suppressing the development of ER-negative breast cancer in experimental laboratory models. Hopefully their project will lead to the actual use of such drugs in women at high risk.

Bio:
Karen Liby earned her PhD from the University of Cincinnati and then joined the laboratory of Michael B. Sporn, a pioneer in the field of chemoprevention. She currently is a member of the Department of Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. She was awarded the Wilson S. Stone Memorial Award by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2007.

Her research priorities are to develop and test new drugs and drugs combinations for the prevention and treatment of cancer. She has tested several novel drugs and found that they can both prevent and treat experimental breast cancer in animals. She is also studying the molecular mechanism of action of these drugs and identifying and validating biomarkers that will needed to evaluate these drugs in the clinic.