University of Melbourne Melbourne, Australia
Professor, Cancer Therapeutics Head, Translational Breast Cancer Genomics and Therapeutics Lab Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
Building large datasets to help tailor more effective treatments for younger patients.
Women younger than 40 years old with breast cancer have poor outcomes, with increased rates of both local and distant recurrence compared with their older counterparts. Although younger women have higher rates of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), hormone receptor (HR) – positive breast cancer seems to be more aggressive in this population. To understand the biological reasons behind this observation, Dr. Loi and her team have been analyzing tumor samples in premenopausal women with breast cancer from the landmark Suppression of Ovarian Function Trial (SOFT) which demonstrated the benefit of the addition of ovarian function suppression to chemotherapy and endocrine therapy after surgery in women under 40.
Dr. Loi and her team are performing RNA profiling on thousands of tumor samples from the SOFT study to investigate the prognostic significance of current gene expression-based signatures in premenopausal women. She has used a gene-expression based test (Prosigna®) that provides metastasis in ten years. They have confirmed that PAM50-ROR scores are prognostic in premenopausal women and that women under 40 with HR-positive breast cancer had lower ten-year recurrence-free periods compared to older women, despite intensive endocrine therapy. No “low risk” category was identified among lymph node-positive women in the SOFT dataset, indicating a high risk of distant recurrence in this group. Notably, the PAM50 ROR score did not predict the benefit of OFS.
They will continue to focus on understanding the immune biology of premenopausal breast cancer and analyses of these prognostic gene expression-based assays in the SOFT study cohort. They will also be , including tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), immune cells that can serve as prognostic biomarkers in breast cancer and other immune cells that may be important for therapeutic targeting. By collecting samples from the same patient from initial diagnosis through recurrence and death, the team is able to detect genetic changes that may drive treatment resistance.
Sherene Loi, MMBS (Hons), FRACP, PhD is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Melbourne and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. She is a medical oncologist and clinician scientist with expertise in genomics, immunology, and drug development in breast cancer. She has published over 295 peer-reviewed research articles and has ranked in the top 1% of highly cited researchers globally by Clarivate Analytics since 2018. She has won numerous international awards including, but not limited to: American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research, European Society of Clinical Oncology’s Breast Cancer Award, and Prime Minister’s Frank Fenner Prize for Life Scientist of the Year (Australia).
Dr. Loi completed her medical oncology training in Melbourne and worked for a large clinical trial network in Brussels, Belgium for nearly a decade before returning to the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre as an independent researcher in 2013. She is the Executive Director of Breast International Group (BIG), Chair of the Executive Committee of the Kathleen Cuningham Foundation Consortium for Research into Familial Aspects of Breast Cancer, and Board Director of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Australia New Zealand Breast Cancer Trials Group, the largest breast cancer clinical trials cooperative group in Australia. She has co-chaired with Dr Roberto Salgado an internationally recognized pathology working group on immune biomarkers in breast cancer (www.tilsinbreastcancer.org) and is a scientific committee member of European Society of Medical Oncology, Molecular Analysis for Precision Oncology Congress, and Molecular Analysis for Precision Oncology Congress.
2015
The Cynthia Lufkin Award
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