Camila dos Santos, PhD

Titles and Affiliations

Associate Professor

Research Area

Exploring how natural biological events impact breast cancer risk and developing strategies to prevent breast cancer in younger women.

Impact

Breast cancer incidence is rising in younger women. Despite advances in treatment, we still do not fully understand why breast cancer develops in younger women—or how to stop it before it starts. Dr. dos Santos explores how natural events in a woman’s life—such as pregnancies or common infections—might influence breast cancer risk. She and her team have discovered that during pregnancy, the immune system produces special antibodies that appear to recognize and respond to the earliest signs of breast cancer. These antibodies could potentially offer a natural form of protection, acting much like a vaccine to prevent cancer from taking hold. The team has also found that laboratory models of urinary tract infections, which are particularly common in younger women, have increased levels of a protein called TIMP1 in their blood. When elevated, this protein leads to changes in breast tissue that create a more favorable environment for cancer to develop. When they blocked this protein, it significantly delayed cancer development.

What’s Next

Dr. dos Santos and her team will test whether pregnancy-related antibodies can prevent breast cancer in laboratory models and whether they can detect early changes in human breast tissue. They will also investigate whether blocking TIMP1 can stop cancer from forming, and whether measuring TIMP1 levels in blood can help predict who is most at risk, especially in those with inherited BRCA1 mutations. While this research is focused on younger women, the findings could benefit all women by uncovering novel strategies for cancer prevention and risk detection.

Biography

Camila dos Santos, PhD is an Associate Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Dr. dos Santos has dedicated her research to uncovering how physiological experiences—such as pregnancy, infection, and hormonal transitions—reshape the mammary gland and influence breast cancer risk in young women. She uses molecular and cellular tools to uncover how these events alter breast cells, with a focus on mechanisms that promote or suppress tumor initiation. They discovered that pregnancy induces lasting changes in mammary epithelial cells by modifying chromatin accessibility, transcriptional identity, tissue stiffness, and breast immunity. More recently, they showed that systemic infections, such as urinary tract infections (UTIs), accelerate tumorigenesis in BRCA1-mutant mice by remodeling the mammary microenvironment and expanding tumor-initiating basal-luminal progenitors. This work highlights how non-mammary insults indirectly drive breast cancer risk through immune and stromal crosstalk. Their approaches integrate organoid cultures, mouse models, chromatin profiling, and single-cell technologies to define how reproductive and immune history shape mammary cell fate. By understanding how normal development and external stressors intersect with genetic susceptibility, Dr. dos Santos group aims to identify new biomarkers and prevention strategies for breast cancer in young women—especially those not captured by traditional risk models.

For her research in normal breast development and breast cancer, she has been granted a series of prestigious awards, including the Rita Allen Foundation Award (2016), the V-Foundation for Cancer Research Award (2016), the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Award (2018), the AACR-Breast Cancer Research Foundation Young Investigator Award (2018), and the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Faculty Award (2021), the Breast Cancer Alliance Award (2023), and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation Award (2023, 2025).