Queen Mary University of London London, United Kingdom
John Snow Professor of Epidemiology
Improving accuracy of predicting breast cancer risk and enhancing our understanding of preventative therapy.
Analysis of biobanked samples—blood, tissue, and clinical data from consenting patients—is critical for cancer research. Mountains of data can be gleaned from biobanks, and Drs. Cuzick and Francis and their teams are pioneers in leveraging the biobanked data to expand our understanding of breast cancer prevention. The High-Risk Breast Cancer Bio-bank (HRBCBB) was established with biospecimens and mammograms from women in the IBIS-I, IBIS-II, IBIS-II DCIS, and LATER clinical trials. Through the years, additional biospecimen from clinical treatment trials in early breast cancer (NeoGem, ELIMINATE, NeoN, CHARIOT, EXPERT) or metastatic breast cancer (DIAmOND, CAPTURE) and the UK/ANZ DCIS trial have been collected and added to the HRBCBB Bio-bank. Studies from these valuable resources may assist with the development of personalized treatments.
Recent analysis of samples from the IBIS-II trial has revealed that higher estradiol levels are associated with higher cancer risk, but also greater benefit from the hormone therapy anastrozole. They demonstrated from samples from the SOFT trial that risk of recurrence scores based on the PAM50 assay, which provides cancer subtyping and risk profiling in postmenopausal women, did not predict benefit of ovarian function suppression treatment in premenopausal patients with hormone receptor (HR)-positive breast cancer.
Prevention research is a long-term game as it takes many years of follow-up to ensure that preventive measures are effective. In the coming year, the team will analyze digitized images from the UK/ANZ DCIS trial using AI to identify treatment resistance and recurrence signatures. They will develop prognostic models that incorporate these signatures and publish recent findings showing infiltrating immune cells in ductal carcinoma in situ are associated with greater recurrence risk but also greater radiotherapy benefit.
Read more about Dr. Cuzick’s project as part of BCRF’s Precision Prevention Initiative here.
Jack Cuzick, PhD is the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology at Queen Mary, University of London. He holds a PhD in Mathematics and has previously worked at Oxford University and Columbia University, New York.
His current interests are in cancer epidemiology and clinical trials, with special interest in prevention and screening. He is currently Chairman of the International Breast Cancer Intervention Study (IBIS) Steering Group and the ATAC trial. He has worked extensively in breast cancer and was the first to report the effect of tamoxifen on contralateral tumors as an indicator of its potential chemo preventive role and has demonstrated that a change in mammographic breast density on endocrine treatment is a biomarker for its effectiveness. He is involved in studies on the use of HPV assays for cervical screening, the use of flexible sigmoidoscopy for colorectal cancer screening and markers for the behavior of early prostate cancer.
Dr. Cuzick is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal Statistical Society, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Royal Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and was awarded a CBE by the Queen in 2017. In 2007, he was chosen by Thompson Scientific as one of the twelve hottest researchers in all of science and this has been re-awarded for several years thereafter. He was awarded the AACR Cancer Prevention Prize in 2012. He is the author of more than 650 peer-reviewed papers and has published in all the major medical journals.
2011
The Delta Air Lines Award
University of Melbourne Melbourne, Australia
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