Research & medical

What is the problem and who is affected?

Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) has the worst survival and no targeted drugs available to treat it.

What is this research hoping to achieve?

Some TNBC tumours produce glutamate, which activates HIF-1, a protein that tumours use to develop new blood vessels so they can find more oxygen, which in turn makes the cancer more aggressive and more resistant to treatment.

Dr Dean Singleton, at Auckland University, has already shown that drugs that block glutamate production can deactivate HIF-1. Now, he’ll use a $237,000 grant to look deeper into how HIF-1 interacts with glutamate-targeted drugs and how we might use that knowledge to improve treatment of TNBC.

This grant is under BCFNZ’s partnership with the Health Research Council and BCC.

Watch Dean talk about his work