BRIDGE Project Targets Immune Escape in Breast Cancer
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- BRIDGE project launches to study how aggressive breast cancers suppress the immune system, focusing on small surface molecules on cells in the tumor microenvironment that may help tumors avoid immune detection
- ITQB NOVA and the Portuguese Institute of Oncology (IPOFG) are collaborating on the initiative, with IPOFG supplying real patient samples to validate prior laboratory discoveries
- Catarina Brito, head of ITQB NOVA's Advanced Cell Models laboratory, leads the project and notes the team previously identified how tumors "communicate with certain cells of the immune system to protect themselves"
- The project is funded by the iNOVA4Health Lighthouse Projects 2025 program, which will provide up to €75,000 over the next two years to bridge lab findings and clinical practice
- Researchers aim to discover new biomarkers that track how each patient's cancer evolves, enabling treatments tailored to individual tumor characteristics rather than a one-size-fits-all approach
- The WHO reported roughly 2.3 million breast cancer diagnoses and 670,000 deaths among women worldwide in 2022, underscoring the urgency of better tools for the most aggressive forms
Why it matters: For clinicians treating the most aggressive and unpredictable breast cancers — the subset that drove most of the 670,000 deaths recorded globally in 2022 — the lack of reliable progression biomarkers is a daily clinical gap. If BRIDGE's glyco-immune signatures hold up in IPOFG's patient samples, doctors could gain predictive tools to match therapies to each tumor's immune-evasion strategy, potentially shifting care from reactive to genuinely personalized.
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