By Angie Leventis Lourgos / Chicago Tribune
The diagnosis shattered the young mother’s world.
At 36, Heather Tubigan of west suburban Chicago discovered an avocado seed-sized lump in her left breast. It was a malignant tumor. The cancer had already spread to her lymph nodes.
Terrified, the patient almost reflexively asked her surgeon to remove both of her breasts, even though the cancer afflicted only one side.
“I just want to get rid of them both,” Tubigan, now 40, recalled. “I just wanted them out. … When you have cancer, you just want to get rid of it.”
Yet the surgeon urged her to reconsider. While the breast with the tumor had to be removed, the physician explained that there were many benefits to keeping the healthy breast intact — including preserving feeling on one side of the chest, which would be gone on the other side after surgery.
That loss of sensation is often more profound than many breast cancer patients can initially comprehend while grappling with a life-changing illness. From the warmth of a hug to sexual arousal, modern medicine is just beginning to appreciate the various functions of the breast as well as how lack of sensation post-mastectomy can alter the lives, intimacy, sexuality and emotions of breast cancer survivors.
“I was going back and forth for so long. Do I keep it? Or do I not?” Tubigan recounted. “Because just the thought of not having my breast and not being able to feel, that was very, very difficult to me. I couldn’t really understand it. You can’t wrap your head around it, to not have any sensation or any feeling.”
In a groundbreaking project, University of Chicago-led researchers are working to restore that sense of touch for patients who have undergone mastectomy. The team of doctors, neuroscientists and bioengineers is building an implantable device dubbed the “bionic breast,” which will be designed to revive feeling post-mastectomy and reconstruction.
“Our surgical approach to reconstructing breasts after cancer treatment has been focused heavily on the appearance, the form of the breasts, rather than the functions,” said Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau, principal investigator of the Bionic Breast Project and UChicago Medicine gynecologist. “And we’re trying to change that understanding with our work.”
The first clinical trial to test a key component of the device is expected to start early 2025, Lindau said.
There are more than 4 million breast cancer survivors in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society; more than 100,000 patients undergo mastectomy each year nationwide.
The bionic breast project received a $3.99 million grant from the National Cancer Institute in summer 2023 to begin clinical trials. The implantable device is partly based on the work of University of Chicago neuroscientist Sliman Bensmaia, whose research helped develop prosthetic limbs that restored a realistic sense of touch to patients who were paralyzed or had amputation.
Lindau and Bensmaia partnered for about seven years to work toward applying a similar technology to restore a sense of feeling in the breast post-mastectomy, until Bensmaia’s sudden and unexpected death at age 49 in August 2023.
While breast reconstruction can cosmetically rebuild the look and form of the chest, Lindau said many mastectomy patients still experience a sense of physical and psychological loss akin to that of a person who loses a limb.
“Some women describe the loss of their breasts as … the loss of their identity, the loss of their femininity,” she said. “And it is an existential loss. It calls into question, for some people, their humanity.”