Deciphering heterogeneity of rare metaplastic breast carcinoma Gold Cohort through spatialomics

Pan-Canadian team will use new funding to better understand rare breast cancers

In Canada, less than one per cent of breast cancer patients are diagnosed with metaplastic breast cancer (MpBC), a rare yet highly aggressive form of the disease. Due to its rarity, MpBC has remained largely understudied, leaving patients with few treatment options and a high risk of poor outcomes.

Thanks to funding from the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network (MOHCCN), a pan-Canadian team of experts came together for the first time in 2024 to establish one of the world’s most extensive MpBC data resources, pooling samples and insights from institutions in Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. Now, this same group of pan-Canadian researchers will receive extra funding through a Terry Fox Research Institute and Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network Technology Development Award, which will allow them to perform more tests on these precious and rare samples, providing valuable information that would not exist otherwise. 

“We’re incredibly excited to launch a new phase for this project,” says Dr. Morag Park, director of the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Institute and the project’s lead. “This new funding will help us to provide the first spatial gene expression and epigenetic landscapes for MpBC, allowing an in-depth understanding of the heterogeneity of this disease and transferring this knowledge to a first drug validation pipeline for metaplastic breast cancers.”

As mentioned by Dr. Park, the team’s work will focus on understanding the heterogeneity of MpBC tumours, which contain diverse populations of cancer cells that respond differently to treatments.

“One of the challenges in treating MpBC is that it isn’t a uniform cancer. A single drug might kill some cells but leave others unharmed, allowing the tumour to persist,” Dr. Park explains. “Our goal is to map this heterogeneity in detail to better inform future therapies.”

Leveraging advanced spatial omics and cutting-edge computational approaches, the team will analyze MpBC samples to predict potential treatment strategies. These predictions will then be validated in pre-clinical models to pave the way for future therapies tailored to MpBC’s unique characteristics.

Importantly, the team, which includes researchers across multiple centres, will use a uniform approach to do this work across the country. This will help validate the use of these technologies for cancer research, helping to add a new layer of data that can be added to the MOHCCN Gold Cohort to enhance precision medicine research for other types of cancer.

“Our collaboration allows us to collect enough samples and deploy a unified approach to studying these sample to gain meaningful insights into this rare disease,” says Dr. Park. “With MOHCCN’s support, we built the first Canadian network focused on MpBC. Now we’re ready to increase our impact by using new technologies to better understand these cancers, getting us closer to finding therapies that target them.”