Titles and Affiliations
Associate Professor of Life Sciences
Professor of Breast Biology, Institute of Cancer Research London, UK
Research Area
Understanding how hormones influence breast cancer development in younger women.
Impact
Breast cancer diagnosed in younger women is often more aggressive, more challenging to treat, and less well understood than breast cancer in older women. Dr. Brisken’s research provides critical insights into how hormones and environmental exposures impact breast cancer risk and aims to further elucidate why breast cancer in younger women behaves differently than in postmenopausal women. By uncovering age-specific differences, the research could guide new strategies to prevent breast cancer and improve treatments tailored to younger patients.
What’s Next
Dr. Brisken and her team will test whether normal breast cells can undergo a pattern of growth associated with normal puberty in their advanced laboratory models, enabling new studies of hormones and environmental factors that may influence risk. They will also investigate whether breast cancers from younger versus postmenopausal women have distinct gene expression patterns, laying the groundwork for future studies on how age impacts tumor biology and response to therapy.
Biography
Cathrin Brisken, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist who studies how reproductive hormones guide normal breast development—and how these same signals go awry in cancer. Early in her career, she showed that estrogen, progesterone, and prolactin act at sequential stages with the breast epithelium as the primary target, and that hormones work through local “paracrine” messengers that coordinate different cell types. Her team identified several of these messengers and uncovered a link—via the secreted enzyme ADAMTS18—between hormone signaling and the breast’s supporting matrix that fuels stem-cell activity.
Committed to relevance for patients, Dr. Brisken built models that preserve human biology. She created an ex vivo system using fresh human tissue to confirm that the progesterone–RANKL axis drives proliferation in the normal breast. In translational research, her group discovered why traditional mouse engraftment pushes human tumor cells toward a false EMT state and pioneered intraductal engraftment—keeping cells in their natural ductal niche. This raised ER+ patient-derived xenograft success from ~2.5% to >90% and yielded the first robust lobular carcinoma xenografts and provided entirely new experimental opportunities to study dormancy and metastasis.
Her leadership extends to cancer prevention and training: she provided evidence that prenatal exposure to BPA can durably alter breast development and that the androgenic properties of contraceptive progestins determine breast cancer risk. Dr. Brisken co-founded the International Cancer Prevention Institute; she led the EPFL doctoral school with 2000 students and coordinated a €4.2M EU doctoral network in Cancer Prevention across seven countries. As part-time faculty at London’s ICR, she leads efforts to design clinical trials for lobular carcinoma patients and to personalize endocrine therapy.
