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After Jenney Lee’s mom, Shelley Dubkin-Lee, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2024, Lee did what many of us do when a loved one faces a medical scare: She turned to the internet to learn everything she could about her mom’s condition.
Dubkin-Lee’s diagnosis was for early-stage invasive lobular carcinoma in one breast. It’s the second most common type of breast cancer, yet it can be difficult to diagnose because it doesn’t show up well on imaging scans.
Dubkin-Lee’s doctors in her small Oregon town made the diagnosis from a mammogram, and then recommended a lumpectomy, a surgery that removes the tumor and a small amount of surrounding tissue while preserving the breast.
Yet, when Lee, a UW Medicine researcher who studies urologic cancers, learned more about her mom’s disease, she wanted to do some digging. She lives in Oregon, too, and is part of the research community in the Pacific Northwest; she figured there might be a colleague studying how best to treat the type of cancer her mom was diagnosed with.
And she was right. Lee found a 2023 review showing that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) might be helpful prior to surgery to see if invasive lobular carcinoma has spread. One of the review’s authors happened to be Sara Javid, MD, a surgical oncologist at UW Medicine and Fred Hutch who studies the use of advanced imaging to guide breast cancer treatment. Javid has done studies in the past on using MRI in other types of breast cancer, such as ductal carcinoma in situ, which is considered very early-stage breast cancer.
The MRI can be helpful specifically because this type of breast cancer can be hard to see in other types of scans, especially if patients have dense breasts, which Dubkin-Lee does.
After the MRI, doctors found that the cancer was actually at multiple sites in both breasts, not one spot in one breast like the mammogram had shown. They changed Dubkin-Lee’s treatment plan to include a few months of chemotherapy after a more comprehensive surgery to ensure the cancer was truly gone.
“Without Dr. Javid's research, we would never have known to advocate for advanced imaging, and those additional sites would not have been found,” Lee says. “It's because of UW research that my mom's cancer treatment was what she actually needed it to be.”
Dubkin-Lee and her daughter don’t blame the doctors in Oregon, who were, in fact, following standard protocols for treatment of invasive lobular carcinoma. Javid’s research is ongoing, but her expertise is important, and as more research is done, the treatment recommendations for this type of cancer will likely be updated. Which is why research matters — without it, patients won’t get the most up-to-date treatment options available to them, options that could end up saving them.
“I’ve worked in healthcare before, so I know about the role of research, but I wouldn’t have known about this research or thought to look for it,” Dubkin-Lee says. “I was very lucky I have someone in my life who found this study. This is why it’s so important for people to know about medical research. I believe it saved my life.”
Dubkin-Lee has recently returned the favor by talking with a friend of a friend who received the same cancer diagnosis. That woman asked for an MRI, too, and is also in recovery after treatment.
