Crowdsourcing effort takes aim at deadliest breast cancers

Forget the pink ribbons. A big new project aims to gather a trove of information about breast cancer in hopes of treating patients whose cancer has spread, or metastasized, and left them nearly out of options.

For many of the 150,000-plus patients nationwide whose tumors have spread, cancer will likely kill them, and the emphasis on pink for breast cancer awareness and survival each October is a little too rosy. They’ve felt neglected by mainstream advocacy and medical research.

The idea is to gather molecular and genetic clues from a broad group of metastatic breast cancer patients. With data from thousands of people, researchers think they might be able to answer questions such as: What allows a very few women to outlive others by many years despite the same prognosis?

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