$7.5 million Med School grant will go to breast cancer technology

The Perelman School of Medicine received $7.5 million last month to improve breast cancer screening techniques in the hopes of catching cancer earlier and with more accuracy.

Katrina Armstrong, the Chief of General Internal Medicine at the Medical School, will lead the initiative funded by the National Cancer Institute, who awarded the five-year grant.

Armstrong stressed the importance of such government funding in ensuring that the “voice” of the scientific community is heard. In light of the recent failure of the sub-committee to cut $1.2 trillion from the federal budget, domestic spending will take a major hit which will limit the grants that the Medical School competes for.

“If this goes into effect, the across-the-board cuts would have a dramatic effect on student aid and research funding,” President Amy Gutmann said.

College Sophomore Lydia Filosa is “disappointed in the government’s inability to ensure funding for this kind of important research.”

Armstrong added that the Medical School was initially in line to receive $10 million for this project, and then had to adapt to see what could be done with 25 percent less funding.

“Losing money to fund these types of initiatives” makes it difficult for the National Institute of Health and others “to prioritize areas that will have a major impact” like breast cancer research.

Though the Medical School has already been granted this funding, Armstrong explained that with the current state in Washington, “there is no guarantee” that the research will be able to proceed.

Armstrong is disappointed in the current representatives on Capitol Hill and felt that they are “currently abdicating their responsibilities.”

“We will be working in Washington to urge Congress to sign a solution to these serious budget problems in a way that doesn’t adversely affect Penn students, staff and faculty,” Gutmann said.

Armstrong explained “there has been a lot of controversy about the ability of screening mammography to reduce breast cancer mortality on its own.”

While mammography is a useful test for many women, it is not without “risk” and therefore is “not the right answer for everyone.”

Mammography has the potential to “miss” cancer in “a lot of high-risk women” and sometimes relays “a false positive,” so it is not one hundred percent reliable, she said.

Armstrong is rejecting the “one-size fits all screening” and hopes that the NCI’s funding will allow the Medical School to devise new methods of screening that “are very closely tied to” the “individual risk” of a patient.

She and her team at the Medical School will be looking into the use of new screening technology that provides three-dimensional images and will use new markers, such as breast density as well as genetic markers.

These techniques would allow doctors to detect breast cancer earlier in women, she said.

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