Massachusetts General Hospital Boston, Massachusetts
Director, Central Nervous System Metastasis Program Associate Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School Massachusetts General Hospital Boston, Massachusetts
Identifying new strategies for the prevention and treatment of breast cancer that has spread to the brain.
Breast cancer that spreads to the brain occurs in more than a third of patients with advanced breast cancer. While advances in cancer therapies have improved our ability to control breast cancer outside of the brain, more breast cancer patients are dying of brain metastases. The genetic and molecular drivers of metastasis are largely unknown. The overarching objective of Dr. Brastianos’ work is to characterize the tumor and immune microenvironment of brain metastases that will shed light on their fundamental biology and to ultimately identify novel therapeutic targets. Dr. Brastianos hopes to quickly translate her team’s scientific findings to innovative clinical trials for patients with breast cancer brain metastases.
Dr. Brastianos’ findings have revealed that there are clinically actionable genetic changes enriched in brain metastases compared to the original primary breast cancer, and this has led to clinical trials that are showing promising results in patients with brain metastases, including a national trial open at more than 400 sites throughout the US. The team has recently demonstrated that brain metastases harbor frequent alterations in specific signaling pathways including the well-known cancer-promoting CDK and PI3K pathways. Dr. Brastianos and team have continued their ongoing work in characterizing the tumor immune microenvironment of central nervous system metastases. All these efforts are providing unique biological insights that will enable novel and innovative approaches to treat patients with brain metastases.
In the coming year, Dr. Brastianos will continue to leverage the unique sample collection of brain metastases that she and her team have built to understand not only the changes within the cancer cells themselves but also changes within the brain environment. Dr. Brastianos and team will use the latest molecular techniques to gain unique biological insights into the mechanisms that enable a tumor to grow within the brain and become resistant to traditional therapies, and ultimately find better therapies for this patient population.
Dr. Priscilla Brastianos is the Director of the Central Nervous System Metastasis Program at Massachusetts General Hospital of Harvard Medical School. Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, she received her BSc in biochemistry and chemistry from the University of British Columbia, where she graduated as her class valedictorian. She completed her medical school training at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and her internal medicine residency training at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Following her training at Johns Hopkins, she pursued her fellowship training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. As a physician-scientist, Dr. Brastianos received a number of prestigious awards for her scholarship and research.
Dr. Brastianos’ research focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms that drive brain metastases. Her pioneering work has led to national multicenter cooperative group trials that she is leading. She also leads a multidisciplinary central nervous system metastasis clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her hope is that the findings from genomic studies will provide an understanding of the molecular pathways that drive brain metastasis, which will allow the development of more rational therapeutic approaches for this common and devastating complication of cancer.
2017
The Boston Hot Pink Luncheon Award in Honor of Nancy and Rick Kelleher
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