Research Areas:
In 2020, there were 2.3 million women diagnosed with breast cancer and 685,000 deaths globally. As of the end of 2020, there were 7.8 million women alive who were diagnosed with breast cancer in the past 5 years, making it the world's most prevalent cancer.
Despite considerable progress in treatment modalities, breast cancer patients die from cancer dissemination and metastases. Current understanding of the underlying processes that allow cancer cells to circulate in the bloodstream and invade and colonize in other organs is limited. Expanding the body of knowledge on these processes is one of our areas of focus.
Immunotherapy is a new modality which has revolutionized the treatment of cancer for multiple types of tumors. However, breast cancer has shown only modest benefit from immunomodulatory therapies, if at al. This is principally due to tumor escape mechanisms. We have only limited understanding of these mechanisms. Our focus on translational research aims to better understand these resistant mechanisms, broaden current clinical applications and overcome some of these unsolved issues.
The research laboratory is located within the campus of the Rabin Medical Center, thereby enabling us to benefit from a fruitful multidisciplinary collaboration with the oncology, surgery and pathology departments and facilitating access to patient tissues and blood specimens. This advantage allows us to perform in-vitro, in-vivo and ex-vivo experiments that more closely mimic clinical conditions of breast cancer.
Research Projects in the lab.
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Elucidation of molecular drivers of the breast cancer metastatic cascade to reveal new biomarkers for clinical translation:
One of the molecular mechanisms studied in our laboratory is the endoplasmic reticulum stress response which is activated in tumor cells and breast cancer leucocytes by commonly used chemotherapy agents for these patients. Our study suggests a different approach to treat metastatic breast cancer. We believe that conventional chemotherapy could be combined with therapies that regulate the unfolding protein response (UPR), a cellular stress response related to the endoplasmic reticulum stress.
- Discovery and study of a novel tumor escape and tumor induce immunosuppression.
We revealed a new tumor escape mechanism implemented by Triple Negative Breast Cancer Cells to induce immunosuppression through the CD45 molecular pathway. We found that breast cancer inhibits the Src family of tyrosine kinases, resulting in the suppression of immune cells. Our aim is to understand and decipher the immunosuppression mechanism used by breast cancer cells to escape tumor cell eradication.
- Development of new immunotherapy strategies for Breast Cancer
Monoclonal antibodies directed against immune checkpoints, e.g., the programmed cell death protein 1 or programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD1/PDL-1), in or without combination with cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen 4 (CTLA-4), have been successfully used for the treatment of different cancer types. In general, immunotherapy has shown only very modest benefit in breast cancer patients. Related to this research, we are studying a novel molecular mechanism of an immune modulating therapeutic peptide (C24D) that reverses the tumor escape mechanism through the CD45 signaling pathway. We aim to develop a new platform of immune-oncology drugs for the treatment of breast cancer based on C24D peptide and the CD45 signaling pathway.