Breast Cancer Treatment Center
Clinical Research
Clinical research is a vital aspect of our mission at the Breast Oncology Center. The goal of this research is not only to give current patients the opportunity to participate in clinical trials offering promising new treatments, but also to improve the lives of future generations of women with breast cancer.
We believe that outstanding clinical care is directly linked to an active program of clinical research. Physician-researchers take the questions that arise from their experiences in the clinic, answer them through clinical trials, and take this new knowledge back to the clinic, where it can benefit patients.
Clinical trials for breast cancer have already resulted in new therapies. For example, the use of a two-drug combination — vinorelbine and Herceptin — was first evaluated at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center and has benefited many women with breast cancer.
Our clinicians are actively involved in clinical research. At any given time, dozens of research studies involving hundreds of patients are under way within the Breast Oncology Center. These studies are broad in scope: investigations of prevention and early-detection strategies, new therapies, novel combinations of existing treatments, quality-of-life studies, and laboratory analyses of tumor samples to better understand the relationship between tumor types and patient outcomes.
The excellence of our research program is widely recognized and supported by many private and public funding sources. Recently, the center and its Harvard-affiliated institutions received a prestigious five-year Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant from the National Cancer Institute to pursue groundbreaking work in the prevention, detection, and treatment of breast cancer.
