Ciencia Puerto Rico

My laboratory studies the relationship between chromosome instability in breast cancers, particularly how centrosome amplification results in multipolar mitosis and defective cytokinesis, generating aneuploidy. Albeit most human tumors are aneuploid, the role of high levels of aneuploidy in cancer is still controversial. Specifically, we address how the Rb/E2F pathway acts as a master controller of centrosome amplification and mitotic dysfunction in cancer. Our latest work has identified several mitotic and centrosome regulators that mediate centrosom amplification and chromosome instability in breast cancer cells. We have published that the overexpression of these proteins correlates strongly with poor survival of breast cancer patients. We would like to know whether these mitotic proteins correlate with poor survival of breast cancer patients in African American and Hispanic populations, which are disproportionately affected by high-risk breast tumors, in particular Her2+ and triple-negative tumors.