Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Leuven, Belgium
Head of the Laboratory for Translational Breast Cancer Research Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine
Improving treatment for advanced triple-negative breast cancer.
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) accounts for 10 to15 percent of all breast cancers and typically has a worse prognosis compared to other breast cancer subtypes. Until recently, chemotherapy was the only systemic therapy option for patients with TNBC, but now targeted antibody-drug conjugates and immune checkpoint inhibitors are available to this group.
Current research has demonstrated that the absence, presence, or modifications of the targets of interest for these therapies of interest can be associated with treatment response or resistance. The biology of tumors and thus the presence of these targets can be heterogeneous, or variable within tumors as well as among metastatic lesions within the same patient. Knowledge is limited, however, largely because of the difficulty of obtaining samples of metastatic lesions for research. Dr. Desmedt’s research aims to better refine treatment for metastatic TNBC.
With this project, Dr. Desmedt aims to provide a comprehensive description of novel therapeutic targets in metastatic TNBC to further refine treatment in these patients. Dr. Desmedt is using a unique repository of about 500 metastatic TNBC samples collected across three post-mortem tissue donation programs—UPTIDER (Belgium), CASCADE (Australia) and UNC Breast Tumor Donation Program (US)—to tackle three main objectives: 1) the investigation of the most relevant treatment targets considering the heterogeneity of metastases among patients and within among metastases in an individual; 2) whether the targets are associated or mutually exclusive; and 3) the investigation of the potential organ specificity of the targets.
Christine Desmedt, PhD is an Associate Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven, Leuven), where she has led the Laboratory for Translational Breast Cancer Research since 2018. She received her bio-engineering degree in Cells and Genes Biotechnology from KU Leuven in 2000. She earned a master’s degree in bio-medical sciences at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2004) and a PhD degree (2008) with Drs. Christos Sotiriou and Martine Piccart as advisors. Besides her teaching duties, Dr. Desmedt is committed to overseeing an excellent multi-disciplinary research team that seeks to further personalize breast cancer treatment for and with patients. The main research areas of her laboratory research are the molecular characterization of breast cancer (including the unraveling of metastatic progression), gaining a better understanding of rarer cancer subtypes such as lobular and mucinous breast tumors, identification of mechanisms of treatment efficacy, and exploring the impact of patient adiposity on breast cancer biology.
Dr. Desmedt serves as co-leader of the Breast Cancer group of the Leuven Cancer Institute (LKI) with Prof. Dr. Hans Wildiers and co-developer/co-leader of the breast cancer research autopsy program at UZ/KU Leuven with Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Floris. Other leadership duties include co-founder/co-coordinator of the European Lobular Breast Cancer Consortium (www.elbcc.org) with Prof. P. Derksen (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands) and Prof. Dr. A. Salomon (Institut Curie, Paris, France), vice-president of the COST Action CA 19138 LOBSTERPOT which is entirely devoted to lobular breast cancer research, and co-coordinator of the Cancer Program of the Doctoral School of Biomedical Sciences at the KU Leuven.
2022
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