Over the past two decades, the pioneering research of Mina Bissell at Berkeley Lab has broadened the conversation about breast cancer beyond genetics to include the microenvironment and other factors. This expanded focus has had profound implications for breast cancer awareness and therapies.

An $18 million, three-year grant to develop new and more effective therapies to fight breast cancer was awarded May 27 to a multi-institutional “Dream Team” of scientists and clinicians that is co-led by Joe Gray, director of Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. The team will pursue personalized treatment that targets individual cancers with tailored therapies.

Working with unique chips that mimic actual molecular conditions in the breast, a team of researchers led by Berkeley Lab’s Mark LaBarge and Mina Bissell has shown that the ultimate fate of a stem or progenitor cell in a woman’s breast – whether the cell develops normally or whether it turns cancerous – may depend upon signals from multiple microenvironments