Titles and Affiliations
Specialist Physician
Department of Pathology
American Association for Cancer Research
Research Area
Using artificial intelligence to better classify invasive lobular carcinoma and predict which patients are at highest risk of relapse.
Impact
Invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) is a common type of breast cancer that is often challenging to diagnose and even harder to predict over the long term, as it can spread later—sometimes years—after initial treatment. Despite growing evidence that ILC behaves differently from other breast cancer types, no prediction tools exist for it specifically, so patients typically receive the same treatments as those with ductal breast cancer. Dr. Djerroudi’s team recently studied ILC using advanced molecular profiling technologies and found that the tumor microenvironment, the ecosystem of cells surrounding the tumor, has distinct features in ILC, identifying four separate microenvironment classes linked to different patient outcomes, and may improve risk prediction and help tailor treatment specifically for ILC patients.
What’s Next
In his research supported by AACR, Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance, and BCRF, Dr. Djerroudi will apply artificial intelligence to standard digital pathology slides to study these microenvironment patterns in tumor samples from more than 3,000 patients treated at the Institut Curie in France and Memorial Sloan Kettering in the United States. The goals are to build a more biologically meaningful classification system for ILC, develop an AI tool that can better predict which patients face higher relapse risk, and use spatial transcriptomics, a technology that maps gene activity while preserving tissue structure, to investigate biological “hotspots” flagged by the AI for new therapeutic targets. All of these tools will be combined into a single, low-cost web application called VIBE-ILC, which works from standard digital pathology slides alone and will be validated across multiple clinical trials, with the goal of bringing robust, precision medicine to ILC patients everywhere, including those in resource-limited settings.
Biography
Lounes Djerroudi, MD, PhD is a pathologist (praticien spécialiste de CLCC) and researcher at Institut Curie (Paris), within the team led by Prof. Anne Vincent-Salomon. He earned his MD in Pathology from Paris Descartes University, a Master’s in Philosophy of Science from Ecole Normal Superieure (Paris), and a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Paris Sciences et Lettres University. His research integrates diagnostic pathology with molecular biology, focusing on invasive lobular carcinoma and the tumor microenvironment. He is a member of the European Lobular Breast Cancer Consortium (ELBCC) and the French UNICANCER Strategic Committee on Breast Cancer (UCBG). His current research aims to improve breast cancer classification and prognostic prediction through high-resolution technologies and artificial intelligence.
