Research

The Division of Surgical Oncology faculty members are dedicated to the advanced treatments through the study and research of melanoma, sarcoma, tumors of the endocrine system and other rare cancers.

Breast Cancer Research

Division faculty members participate in breast cancer clinical trials sponsored by the Southwest Oncology Group, the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project and the American College of Surgeons Oncology Division. We also conduct translational research in optical imaging of the breast and predicting prognosis in patients with early breast cancer.

In the mid-1990s, UC Irvine researchers began using a non-invasive diagnostic technique called Diffuse Optical Imaging (DOI) to quantitatively examine normal and malignant breast tissue with near-infrared light. Pilot project findings led to a three-year Department of Defense grant to use the imaging technique to monitor patient responses to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in locally advanced breast cancer. Dr. Butler, Dr. Hsiang and other division faculty published the resulting data in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007.

Another major imaging study, “Breast Cancer Multi-Dimensional Diffuse Optical Imaging,” is ongoing with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois, Harvard and Dartmouth Universities. The goal of the $6-million study is to develop an optical platform for future NIH breast cancer research projects. Researchers now are at work on the clinical phase of neoadjuvant use of the optical breast scanner.

Division researchers also have embarked on a five-year project to evaluate Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging as a method of predicting which patients with early stage breast cancer are at risk for developing locally recurrent or metastatic disease. On the basis of early data generated by this study, UC Irvine received a two-year, $250, 000 grant to evaluate this technique for use on patients with highly suspicious mammograms as well as those with atypical hyperplasia and ductal carcinoma in-situ on stereotactic biopsy.

Faculty members have established a translational tumor research program with the Beckman Laser Institute and the John Tu and Thomas Yuen Center for Functional Onco Imaging at the Irvine campus.

Melanoma Research

In the area of melanoma research, surgical oncology researchers have numerous active studies underway. Recent projects include:

• Development of a comprehensive patient database, including sentinel lymph node mapping and chemoresistance assays
• Evaluation of pigmented skin lesions with Spectrophotometric Intracutaneous Analysis (SIA), a new imaging technology, to help determine whether a biopsy is needed
• Evaluation of the accuracy of SIA in diagnosis
• Immunotherapy treatment, including a multi-institutional vaccine trial in stage II melanoma patients and a second phase trial involving a peptide vaccine and granulocyte monocyte colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) in stage III and stage IV patients
• Identification of high-risk lesions based on the degree of angiogenesis, and correlation of clinical outcomes with SIA tumor analysis

Ongoing Research Projects

• Epidemiology and population studies to determine whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of recurrence in patients with early stage breast cancer
• Assessment of follow-up needs of breast cancer survivors to improve care
• Creation of a prospective database to identify additional risk factors for breast cancer
• Participation in a multi-institution device trial to reduce the breast cancer re-excision rate
• Development of a protocol to extract and identify cancer stem cells

Future Research Projects

Future projects include examining the effect of hormonal agents on breast physiology. Previous data have shown that optical measurements in menopausal patients are sensitive to changes resulting from the use of hormone replacement as well as the treatment of breast cancers with anti-estrogen compounds. The study’s goal is to characterize these changes in a larger cohort of patients and quantitatively measure the efficacy of various hormonal breast therapies and the risks associated with various hormone replacement regimens. This data will be correlated with previous results in a study volumetric mammography density and predicting breast cancer risk in patients with dense breast tissue.