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Studying Bones and Seashells for Breast Cancer Research

A Cornell University interdisciplinary collaboration used a materials science approach to fingerprint the calcium mineral deposits, microcalcifications, that reveal pathological clues to the progression of breast cancer and potentially other diseases. Watch this video to see what they learned — pathological breast calcification signatures reflect the tumor microenvironment and correlate with cancer severity.

“Usually after the initial mammogram, microcalcifications are largely ignored. And what we’re saying is we can look beyond the resolution of the mammogram, at the microscopic and chemical level, and get more information from these microcalcifications,” said co-senior author Lara Estroff  , professor of materials science and engineering in Cornell Engineering.

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    Transcript

    00:00:02 The study of biomineralization is how organisms make the solid components of their tissue. So a mollusk shell, like you might find on a beach is composed of a mineral called calcium carbonate. Right? It's the same. It's like the chalk that you write on the chalkboard with. For most of my career, I've been looking at these physiological processes. So the way the biology is supposed to work, we all want strong bones. We all want nicely formed teeth, but sometimes mineral forms in your body where you don't want it, right?

    00:00:34 So some more common examples would be kidney stones. Claudia Fishbach, my collaborator in biomedical engineering, introduced me to this type of pathological mineral, which are micro calcifications that form associated with some types of cancer, in particular breast cancer. Over these ten years by taking techniques that are used mainly in material science to characterize non-biological tissues; by turning the focus of those techniques onto these micro calcifications what we've learned is that when those deposits form in the breast tissue,

    00:01:10 they are influenced by the local environment in which they're forming and may very well trap information that is relavent to disease, diagnosis and prognosis. We took all those parameters for each mineral, generated this fingerprint, and then we sorted the signatures and it was amazing that it fell out using clustering. You know, we didn't input anything about the pathology, but the groups that formed, they were pathologically relevant groups, just based on the mineral properties. One possibility is that, you know, you have the cancer cells and stuff that would normally get degraded or immobilized, gets trapped.

    00:01:52 It gets trapped in this... in this mineral. And we might, you know, might be able to access that information using material science based techniques. I mean, this is why I came to Cornell, right? I came to Cornell because I knew it was a collaborative place and I knew my research was going to go in directions that I couldn't predict. It's rewarding and it's sobering. It really reminds you, like when when you are working with patient samples, like every single one of those is is someone's life.

    00:02:25 And it's, you know, a family that's been impacted by the disease. So, yeah, it's a very serious responsibility. But hopefully there's payoff and reward at the end.