The Carol Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund of Central New York is going national.
Pink Outside the Box is a 12-week fund raising campaign that will encourage supporters to raise money in unique ways with the funds helping researchers at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.
One researcher, Dr. Debashis Ghosh, is hoping to use some of the money raised on a project that could prevent breast cancer.
Ghosh, a pharmacology professor, belongs to a research group looking at a way to prevent cancer through something called aromatase inhibitors, which stop the production of estrogen. Aromatase is an enzyme that turns the hormone androgen into estrogen. The inhibitors stop that process altogether.
“That actually reduces the amount of estrogen levels that allow tumors to grow. So we are particularly interested in estrogen-dependent breast cancer, which is 70-80 percent of all breast cancers.”
Ghosh says the hormone therapy they hope to design may not necessarily be a cure, but a way to prevent the disease that affects one in eight women.
He hopes the Upstate research, fueled by the Baldwin fund, can lead to clinical research that can be parlayed into bigger and larger grant applications from the federal government to go to drug trials.
