Home > News > Komen News

  


Bookmark and Share

Clinical Investigator Awardee Using Susan G. Komen for the Cure® Funds to Better Understand, Treat Common Breast Lesion in Younger Women

Applications for 2009 Society of Surgical Oncology Award for $100,000 Now Available


Share This

DALLAS – May 14, 2009 – For many years, Tari King, M.D. has believed that not all “high risk lesions” in the breast, like one type commonly found in premenopausal women called lobular carcinoma in situ (LCIS), should be treated the same, because she thinks some are more likely than others to develop into breast cancer.

King, an assistant attending surgeon and the Jeanne A. Petrek Junior Faculty Chair at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as well as assistant professor of surgery at Weill Medical College of Cornell, began doing research in 2001 to prove her hypothesis.

As a result of her work in this field, King received the 2008 Society of Surgical Oncology’s first Clinical Investigator Award in Breast Cancer Research, funded by Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, and she’s enthusiastic about the progress she expects to make as a result of it.

“It was an honor to receive the award. The Society of Surgical Oncology is considered the premier surgical society in our profession and to receive this recognition from the SSO and Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation is a great honor.  It will help our lab considerably.”

When she began her work eight years ago, King had to overcome one big challenge: LCIS lesions are very small and are most often incidental findings in the breast tissue when women undergo biopsy for another reason. This has made them difficult to collect and study. Dr. King’s lab has developed a protocol to collect these lesions in fresh frozen tissue and technological advances have considerably improved researchers’ ability to handle and examine them.

“We’ve basically climbed the mountain and in the next few months expect to generate a lot of data,” King said in a recent interview. “We’ve paid our dues and are very excited about what we may discover.”

She hopes her lab will be able to prove her original theory that “not all LCIS is created equal and that some will behave as precursors to invasive breast cancer and conversely some will not.”

In either case, she hopes that her work will provide doctors with a method to better define the risk associated with a new case of LCIS so they can tailor their surveillance and/or treatment recommendations accordingly, King said.

Applications for the 2009 SSO Clinical Investigator Award in Breast Cancer Research, funded again by Komen for the Cure, are now available. Applicants must serve a central role in the conduct of a specific clinical research project. This could include a leadership role in a cancer trial, in cancer outcomes research, or a translational research project related to a prospective clinical trial.

The $100,000 award runs for two years.  Applicants must be surgical oncologists within 10 years of completion of training and full SSO members.

Learn more about the SSO CIA in Breast Cancer Research, funded by Susan G. Komen for the Cure®.

Please note that the deadline for submission of applications is Wednesday, July 1, 2009.

Funding for the award will begin October 1, 2009.