University of Kansas Medical Center Kansas City, Kansas
Professor of Internal Medicine Assistant Director of Clinical Research Tyler Frank B Professor of Cancer Research Co-Leader of the Drug Discovery, Delivery, and Experimental Therapeutics Program Vice Chair, SWOG Breast Committee
Improving personalized treatments for triple-negative breast cancer.
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) represents 10 to 15 percent of diagnosed breast cancers and is very aggressive and fast-growing. The “triple-negative” in TNBC refers to the cancer cells lacking three key markers found in more common breast cancers: receptors for estrogen (ER), progesterone (PR), or HER2. Unfortunately, this means that TNBC will not respond to drugs that target these markers, leaving TNBC patients with few treatment options. Dr. Sharma’s goal is to assess biomarkers of response to chemotherapy and targeted agents and to study the relationship of race with treatment response in TNBC.
Previous studies have shown that breast cancers that lack capabilities for repairing double-strand DNA breaks or that have immune cell infiltration respond better to treatment. Dr. Sharma is leveraging archived and prospective data from patients participating in SWOG breast cancer clinical trials to identify biomarkers that can inform treatment decisions. Utilizing a cohort of 425 patients from SWOG clinical trials, her team described a novel dual TNBC prognostic classification based on two gene signatures: immune function and DNA damage repair status. They found that TNBC tumors that were negative in both immune and DNA damage repair status demonstrated the poorest prognosis.
The team will continue to examine the poorest prognostic class to assess whether different biological vulnerabilities exist in Black versus white patients. They will also complete a comprehensive multi-omics tissue analysis, thus enabling further analysis of racial disparity in breast cancer outcomes. Addressing and improving racial and ethnic representation in breast cancer clinic trials is an important aspect of facilitating precision medicine and is also an integral part of the overall long-term goals of her project.
Priyanka Sharma, MD is a Professor of Medicine and Assistant Director of Clinical Research at the University of Kansas Medical Center. She completed medical school at University of Baroda, India, and residency and fellowship at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in internal medicine and hematology, respectively. Dr. Sharma serves as the Vice-Chair of the SWOG Breast Committee (2018-present) and has been member of the SWOG Board of Governors since 2015, as well as a member of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) breast cancer steering committee. She is a past recipient of the Advanced Clinical Research Award, Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation (2015-2018) supported by BCRF.
In addition to national and institutional leadership roles, Dr. Sharma is actively involved in clinical and translational breast cancer research. Her long-term research goal is to delineate personalized treatment strategies for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and BRCA mutation-associated breast cancer. She serves as Translational Principal Investigator (PI) of an ongoing NCI-funded SWOG trial for patients with TNBC (S1416) and as PI of an active translational SWOG study (S9313c) which also focuses on TNBC. Outside of SWOG, Dr. Sharma has served as PI of several investigator-initiated trials assessing novel therapeutic agents for breast cancer.
2021
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