University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus Denver, Colorado
Professor, Department of Pathology
Discovering ways to improve treatment response in patients with estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.
Breast cancers that are driven by estrogen—called estrogen receptor (ER)-positive, have the best five-year prognosis of any breast cancer. Despite effective therapies to treat ER-positive breast cancer, one-quarter to one-third of patients will experience a breast cancer recurrence. The goal of Dr. Sartorius’ BCRF research is to identify and test vulnerabilities in a common but understudied group of cells in ER-positive tumors that are ER-negative. This population of cells may be responsible for drug resistance and recurrence and behaves like cancer stem cells, which can initiate and drive cancer progression. By understanding how these cells promote tumor growth and identifying their weaknesses, she hopes to identify strategies to turn them off and prevent recurrence.
Dr. Sartorius and her team have developed endocrine and drug-resistant variants of ER-positive breast cancer from their breast cancer model system. The team’s drug-resistant cells grow tumors in laboratory models and these tumors shed circulating tumor cells (CTCs) into the blood in small clusters. In recent findings, Dr. Sartorius and team found these cell clusters are enriched in ER-negative cells. The team compared DNA between the original and drug-resistant breast cancer cells in the presence or absence of bone marrow-derived cells. They expect analysis will help identify factors that change in the drug-resistant cells when in a bone environment. Collectively, this work contributes to Dr. Sartorius’ overarching goal to resolve how drug resistance and the tumor environment contribute to disease progression.
The team will continue analyzing gene expression of matched ER-positive primary breast tumors and bone metastases. In addition, they will test specifically identified cancer cell surface proteins that assist cancer cell survival and that mediate interaction with blood cells during endocrine resistance.
Carol Sartorius, PhD earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and PhD from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, both in Molecular Biology. She did her postdoctoral work at the University of Colorado Boulder and is currently a Professor of Pathology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (UC-AMC).
Dr. Sartorius’s research studies the biology, progression, and endocrine resistance of hormone receptor positive breast cancer. Her laboratory seeks to understand the molecular basis of transcriptional regulation by progesterone receptors (PR) and how this impacts estrogen receptors (ER) and tumor cell phenotype. Current research topics include hormone regulation of cancer stem cells and tumor heterogeneity, hormone regulation of metastasis, hormone control of translation and protein synthesis, and how host obesity and metabolic syndrome specifically affect ER-positive breast cancer and endocrine resistance. Dr. Sartorius’s team also specializes in developing hormone-dependent breast cancer models. She is the co-founder and co-director (with Dr. Peter Kabos) of the breast cancer patient-derived xenograft (PDX) bank at UC-AMC. Their collection emphasizes ER and PR-positive tumors. These tumor models are being characterized by genomic and proteomic techniques to discover novel hormone receptor interactions that can be leveraged for treatment. The goal is to improve hormone-directed therapies for breast cancer.
She is an active member of the Cancer Biology Training Program at UC-AMC with an interest in training the next generation of scientists in the field of hormones and cancer. Her laboratory trains predoctoral students, and postdoctoral and clinical fellows.
2017
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