Massachusetts General Hospital Boston, Massachusetts
Co-Director of Breast Pathology Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School
Discovering new strategies to treat estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.
Estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer can be successfully treated with an anti-estrogen (endocrine) therapy in most cases, but resistance is common. Dr. Sgroi is identifying predictors of treatment response in ER-positive breast cancers that can assist oncologists in the treatment-making process. The gene HOXB13 is expressed in some ER-positive breast cancers and is shown to be a predictor of response to endocrine treatments, but the mechanism is poorly understood. Dr. Sgroi is working to understand why HOXB13 predicts the benefit from extended endocrine therapy in women with ER-positive breast cancer, which will provide new avenues of treatment for ER-positive breast cancers that are resistant to anti-estrogen therapy.
Dr. Sgroi and his team have made several key insights into the role of HOXB13 in response to endocrine therapies. He and his team found that HOXB13-expressing tumors display a significant growth advantage as compared to those tumors not expressing HOXB13. This response is driven, in part, by ovarian hormones and immune suppression. The team also discovered that HOXB13 alters the tumor immune microenvironment. These findings could lead to novel combinations of anti-hormonal therapies and immunotherapies for patients with HOXB13-expressing ER-positive breast cancer.
Dr. Sgroi and his team will follow on these observations using a HOXB13-expressing breast cancer model to determine the role of lymphocytes, a type of immune cell, in ER-positive breast cancer and investigate the role that ovarian hormones play in modulating the immune microenvironment.
Dennis C. Sgroi, MD is a Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School, and Co-Director of Breast Pathology and Member of the Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital. He maintains an active clinical practice on the breast pathology consultation service, and he is actively engaged in translational research. He has served on the scientific advisory board for the Barnett Institute at Northeastern University and currently serves on the scientific advisory board for the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.
The overarching goals of research in the Sgroi laboratory are to develop better ways to identify patients who are at risk for the development of breast cancer and to identify those breast cancer patients who are likely to benefit from targeted drug therapies. His laboratory is taking several different approaches to achieving these goals. First, they are deciphering specific molecular events that occur during the earliest stages of tumor development and using this knowledge to develop biomarkers that will predict for increased risk of progression to cancer. Second, using advance molecular technologies, they are searching for novel breast cancer biomarkers to identify patients with hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer who are most likely to benefit from extended hormonal therapy and from novel targeted therapeutics.
2015
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