Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai New York, New York
Associate Professor of Medicine and Oncological Sciences
Developing new treatments for triple-negative breast cancer.
Despite advances in treatments for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive form of breast cancer that is more likely to spread than other subtypes, it remains a deadly disease for many patients. While chemotherapy and immunotherapy are effective for some, not all respond or sustain their response to those treatments. Drs. Irie and Port are investigating targets for new therapeutics for patients with TNBC.
The team has identified an important driver of TNBC tumor growth and metastasis called protein tyrosine kinase 6 (PTK6). They have developed novel compounds that reduce levels of PTK6 by degrading it – an advantage over classical drugs that only inhibit protein activity.
The team will test the efficacy of PTK6 degraders in pre-clinical models that closely mimic patient tumors, including those resistant to chemotherapy. They will monitor their toxicity and pharmacological properties and use them as tools to determine how PTK6 regulates growth and survival of TNBC cells. Understanding these mechanisms will help identify biomarkers that predict whether a patient will respond to PTK6 degraders once they are clinically developed.
Hanna Irie, MD, PhD is Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology and in the Department of Oncological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. She received her MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School and completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, followed by a clinical fellowship in Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The focus of her research is to identify and validate novel therapeutic strategies for high risk and metastatic breast cancer. Recent research efforts have focused on oncogenes that regulate ephithelial-mesenchymal transition, drug resistance and metastases of breast cancer cells. Her laboratory collaborates with chemical biologists to develop and validate novel therapeutics targeting oncogenes and pathways. She and Dr. Port have worked on the generation of novel patient-derived estrogen receptor (ER)-positive and triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) models that enable validation of novel therapeutics. Their work further investigates biomarkers of chemotherapy and immunotherapy resistance to complement validation of these novel therapeutics. She and Dr. Port serve as co-PIs of the Mount Sinai Breast Tumor Biospecimen Repository which has banked over 500 breast tumor specimens.
“If not for BCRF, we would not have been able to take on the challenges associated with developing novel therapeutics for triple-negative breast cancer, from identification of new gene targets to drug design and validation.”
2014
The Women's Cancer Research Fund Award
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
New York, New York
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