Susan Dovey

Wellington, Nov 23 NZPA - An Otago University researcher is investigating whether treatment choices made by rural women diagnosed with breast cancer can hurt their long term survival rate.

Associate Professor Susan Dovey's research is probing differences in treatment given to rural and urban women in Otago and Southland for breast cancer and she is attempting to find out why rural women make specific treatment choices.

The research, funded by the Breast Cancer Foundation for $46,000 this year and $17,000 next year, is looking at whether rural women choose more extensive surgery than urban women , and whether series of treatments, such as radiation therapy, are less accessible because of the need for repeated trips to a city.

Foundation executive trustee Heather Shotter said the research met its mandate to improve survival for New Zealand's rural women diagnosed with breast cancer.

"By understanding the reasons rural women make the treatment decisions they do, hopefully in the future, it will increase their survival," she said. The foundation is expanding services and programmes to advance the survival rate for breast cancer, and improve the quality of life for patients. Prof Dovey's research is one of five projects for which the foundation today announced funding. Another was Dr Geoff Krissansen's study at Auckland University, which aims to enhance hormonal therapies for breast cancer using a beneficial iron-binding protein. His funding of $45,000 will enable more work on breast cancer which has spread to other sites in the body -- such metastasised cancers are still largely an incurable disease .

Dr Krissansen's research may provide clues to the missing link to a cure, based on a theory that hormonal therapies for breast cancer can be boosted using a protein, lactoferrin, part of the body's defence system.

A total of $250,000 has been allocated by the foundation, through its medical advisory committee chaired by breast surgeon, Dr Belinda Scott. Dr Scott said the foundation received 11 applications , and has funded four of these proposals, in addition to a second year of funding ($50,000) to Dr Euphemia Leung at Auckland University. Dr Leung's research focuses on early detection of resistance to the anti-estrogen drug Tamoxifen so as to provide opportunity for early intervention with alternative treatments for breast cancer patients.

Another project investigating causes of resistance of breast cancer to drugs, such as Tamoxifen, received a grant of $73,000.

That research, by Dr Michael Black and an Otago colleague, Dr Sarah Song, will mine publicly-available breast tumour data from all over the world, in combination with genomic information from hundreds of cancer-cell lines. They hope to identify the DNA changes which linked to drug resistance which drive the progress of breast cancers. Foundation analyst Valerie Pennick said that such research could help to provide targeted treatment for patients whose disease was not stopped by conventional therapy. The foundation has also provided $60,000 for Dr Paul Oei of IGENZ Ltd and Dr Reena Ramsaroop of Diagnostic Medlab in Auckland to develop a simple, reproducible, routine clinical laboratory test to predict survival and risk of recurrence of breast cancer in NZ.