Women with African ancestry present as a group of people with higher rate of aggressive breast cancers but have a disadvantaged socio-economic status which limits their access to even the available care. Both of these factors predispose them to having poor outcomes for breast cancer. The study of TNBC among women facing an elevated risk of these tumors (such as women with African ancestry) is therefore critical to the effort of advancing our understanding of the pathogenesis and management of this breast cancer subtype. Expanding this work to study TNBC among African women who share ancestry with African American women is then the next critical step in developing a larger, comprehensive picture of the biology of TNBC.
An abundance of data shows that breast cancers are heterogeneous and that only a small and discrete subpopulation of cells within a tumor, called the breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs), possesses self-renewal capacity and the ability to establish metastatic colonies . TNBCs, BCSCs, and breast cancer patients of African ancestry represent three distinct topics that feature at least one common denominator: an association with increased breast cancer virulence. Each of these topics can be furthermore correlated with one another to varying degrees: i) TNBC is more common among women of western, sub-Saharan African ancestry 7-9 ii). TNBC/basal subtype tumors are enriched with populations of cells that express BCSC markers; and iii) breast cancer patients of western, sub-Saharan African ancestry have an increased prevalence of tumors that express stem cell markers.
Establishing and characterizing patient derived xenografts of Ghanaian breast tumors. To improve the prognosis for TNBC in women with African ancestry and thus all patients with TNBC, there is the need to develop specific tumor models to study the molecular and biological characteristics of the tumors, with the hope of finding robust markers for early diagnoses and effective options for treatment. I have hypothesized that, the increased prevalence of TNBC in African American women is linked to genetic western sub-Saharan African ancestry and that in order to find new treatment target for TNBC, there is the need to study the tumor initiating cells in the populations with the highest prevalence to identify biomarkers. (CITATION)
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