The Haley Cremer Foundation generously donated $5000 to advance Dr. Mehra Golshan’s breast cancer research at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. The Foundation’s gift was matched dollar-for-dollar by an anonymous donor furthering the impact of this donation. As a member of the Institute’s President’s Circle Corporate Leaders, the Foundation’s support is instrumental in ensuring that the research conducted by leading investigators remains at the forefront of discovery, and that the care provided to patients remains equally compassionate and exceptional.
About Dr. Golshan’s current research:
Each year in the United States over 240,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer.
For patients with early-stage breast cancer, breast-conserving surgery (lumpectomy) along with whole breast radiation is a standard approach in treatment. The foremost goal of breast conserving surgery is to remove the cancerous tissue and leave the patient with a cosmetically acceptable result. However, despite improvements in surgical techniques and imaging, challenges remain in distinguishing cancerous breast tissue from normal breast tissue during surgery. The result is that patients who undergo lumpectomy often face additional surgery to achieve complete tumor removal this happens in up to 40% of cases.
He and his colleagues are studying the use of these intra-operative diagnostic biomarkers and tools including MRI and mass spectrometry in the Advanced Multimodality Image Guided Operative Suite (AMIGO) at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Institute to determine if they can identify and remove residual tumor while the patient is under anesthesia, with the aim to improve patient outcomes and reduce re-excision rates. Support from the Haley Cremer Foundation is providing critical support to help fund this research aimed at better treating this cancer which will reach 1.7 million cases world wide in 2016.