
Chi-Chen Hong, PhD
Associate Member
Department of Cancer Prevention and Control
Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center
Buffalo, New York
Areas of Focus: Heredity & Ethnicity, Lifestyle & Prevention, Tumor Biology
Co-Investigator: Christine B. Ambrosone, PhD, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, New York
CURRENT RESEARCH:
- Understanding the molecular drivers of aggressive breast cancer in African American women and how these are different in Caucasian women.
- Shedding light on molecular factors that contribute to worse mortality rates in Black women compared to white women.
- Increasing the enrollment of white women in the Women’s Circle of Health Study (WCHS) to match the same number of white women to black women for a more in-depth analysis.
Drs. Hong and Ambrosone are investigating the types of immune cells that are in and around breast tumors from African American and white women and whether immune cell populations affect tumor aggressiveness. Recent findings suggest these immune cells in the tumors of African American women are defective in their ability to kill cancer cells.
TNBC is an aggressive disease that disproportionately affects women of African ancestry. Why this disparity exists is not well understood. Drs. Hong and Ambrosone are studying breast tumor tissues from both African American and Caucasian women to identify factors that may influence the incidence of TNBC in African American women.
BIO
Dr. Chi-Chen Hong is an Associate Member in the Department of Cancer Prevention and Control within the Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences at Roswell Park. Dr. Hong’s research is focused on breast cancer etiology, survivorship, and prognosis. Specifically, her interests are on the influence of lifestyle, comorbidity, genetics, and immune factors. She has an ongoing prospective cohort study of early stage breast cancer patients to examine issues in breast cancer survivorship, and with colleagues at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and Rutgers University is principal investigator of a study examining the role of obesity and related comorbidities, including asthma and type 2 diabetes, and their management on quality-of-life and breast cancer survival outcomes among African American women, and to elucidate key pathways mediating these associations.