Tackling triple-negative breast cancer: Development of a novel nuclear medicine-based strategy to create a personalised medicine approach for a biomarker-negative cancer type

Project summary

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is the most aggressive breast cancer type with an urgent need for new treatment options. As TNBC lacks cancer specific biomarkers this is extremely challenging. However, heparan sulphate proteoglycans (HSPGs) with a distinct and cancer-specific sulfation pattern, resulting in a negative charge, were identified in this cancer type. Moreover, Crotamine, a positively charged cell-penetrating peptide has shown to uniquely have high affinity for the negative charge of the HSPGs. We propose to exploit the above-mentioned cancer specific HSPG pattern and unique properties of Crotamine to develop a radiolabelled Crotamine peptide for internal radiation therapy of TNBC.