Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Centers

The summary for the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Centers grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the National Institutes of Health, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Centers: The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) invite applications to create a network of research centers in which multidisciplinary teams of scientists, clinicians, and breast cancer advocates work collaboratively on a unique set of scientific questions that focus on how chemical, physical, biological, and social factors in the environment work together with genetic factors to cause breast cancer. Answering these questions will allow the translation of such findings into information that can be applied to increase awareness of the causes of breast cancer. This program will support a network of cooperative agreements (U01) comprised of research teams, which will work within and across centers on targeted biological and epidemiologic research projects. These projects will be designed to fill specific gaps related to how environmental exposures impact the development of the mammary gland at the cellular, molecular, organ, and population level throughout a woman=s lifetime to influence future breast cancer risk. The research conducted will take a unique developmental approach to integrate time, susceptibility and exposure in order to more fully appreciate the changes that occur in the mammary gland early in life that may predispose the breast to cancer. These projects will help to define specific periods of susceptibility of the breast when environmental stressors may change the molecular architecture of the gland, conferring increased risk of future cancer. The purpose of implementing a network of cooperative breast cancer centers is twofold. The first goal is to integrate scientific information on histologic, pathologic, cellular, and sub-cellular changes that occur in normal mammary gland tissue across the lifespan and compare this to exposure-induced changes. Discovering changes in gene and protein expression due to agents to which young girls and women may be exposed during their lifetime will be a primary goal. Experiments will be conducted cooperatively, using animal models that characterize pathways related to breast and endocrine system development during early life, puberty, pregnancy, and other time points, which may be affected by exposures to environmental stressors occurring at different windows of vulnerability. When clinical specimens are available from women at risk, they will be compared to animal models. Data from these experiments will be made available to the scientific community in order to stimulate further investigations of mechanisms of interest. A second goal is to conduct a focused and coordinated epidemiologic study of determinants of puberty in girls. Attention will be paid to understanding the shift towards earlier puberty among adolescent girls, the identification of environmental exposures in young girls, and the interplay between genetic polymorphisms and environmental exposures that may put them at risk of future breast cancer. The overall goal of this network of centers is to integrate the basic biological, toxicologic, and epidemiologic data on the development and lifespan of the mammary gland in a way that public health messages can be designed to educate young girls and women who are at high risk of breast cancer on the role of specific environmental stressors in breast cancer development and how to reduce exposure to those agents. This information will be useful in developing clinical and public health programs that target breast cancer prevention in young girls and women. This research program complements other programs on breast cancer and mammary gland development being conducted at the National Institutes of Health. The unique focus of this program extends that research by comparing the effects of environmental stressors, including environmental pollutants, nutritional and lifestyle factors, and other exposures on normal mammary gland development in order to more fully consider the multiple causes of breast cancer.