蜜桃传媒

When it comes to remembering and honoring the work and spirit of Saxon Graham, Christine Ambrosone doesn’t have to stray too far from her center.

An alumna of UB’s epidemiology department — back when it was the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine — Ambrosone thought back fondly on the short few years she spent on campus with Graham, the late department chair who is considered one of the fathers of U.S. chronic disease epidemiology,

Graham’s work in molecular and nutrition epidemiology served as an inspiration, she said — especially the work he did studying links between diet and cancer. She’s followed closely in those footsteps after learning mostly from Graham’s direct successors.

But there was another side of Graham’s presence on campus that helped Ambrosone, too. It wasn’t just knowledge and quality research.

“We all really looked up to him,” she said. “But he was kind, and he was warm, as well as being such a great scholar.”

Ambrosone, who spoke at UB last month as the 2025 Saxon Graham lecturer, turned those years with Graham into a career in epidemiology. She’s currently professor of oncology and chair of the Department of Cancer Prevention and Control at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, as well as associate director for population sciences and director of the Roswell Park Biorepository and Laboratory Services Shared Resource.

Ambrosone’s used her position to continue looking, through molecular epidemiology, to understand why poor-prognosis breast cancer subtypes are more prevalent in Black women.

Breast cancer, she said, is a difficult disease to narrow down, in terms of risk factors. While other cancers have more direct links — like smoking and lung cancer and sun exposure and skin cancer — hormones play a significant role in breast cancer development and can muddy up the search for any sort of smoking gun, she said.

Study design improvement may help change this, she said. But efforts in trying to understand susceptibility date back decades, with some researchers like her studying the microscopic world’s impact on human bodies, from proteins to enzymes, and even more biochemistry-related aspects.

“All diseases are related to biochemical individuality,” Ambrosone said. “And in 1956, (Graham) was talking about this. And we didn’t really take this into account in our research studies until, I don't know, maybe 15, 20 years ago.”

Years of research in the field took Ambrosone to Arkansas, where she worked alongside Deborah Erwin, now a professor of oncology at Roswell. They looked at the diets of Black women living in the Mississippi delta, trying to figure out why incidences weren’t higher, but mortality was, compared to white women.

In explaining it, Ambrosone first turns to socioeconomic factors. Access to reliable transportation, especially in that region of the country, was an issue for Black women, she said. Preventive practices and adherence to treatment can be reduced as travel becomes increasingly difficult, affecting doctor office and pharmacy visits, among other struggles.

It only explains some of the issues, though, she said. Their research looked at actual tumor biology to see if there was something making the types of tumors Black women develop different from those in the breasts of white women.

After studying tumors for many years — and piggybacking off a handful of other studies looking at the same thing that published in various journals — two results stood out: both having many children and a lack of breastfeeding increased risks of triple-negative breast cancer (tumors negative for hormone receptors), a poor-prognosis form of the disease.

And Black women tended to have more children and were less likely to breastfeed, she said.

Yet, for some reason, only a small scientific journal published the results. There were no headlines plastered on the front page of The New York Times and other major publications highlighting the breakthrough, she said.

Results showed some statistical significance, she said, and replicating the work has shown substantial results. But it’s tough to publish reproductions, she said.