Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Boston, Massachusetts
Associate Professor and Attending Physician Harvard Medical School
Identifying novel treatment combinations for metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive form of breast cancer with few treatment options, and a high likelihood of spreading to other organs of the body—a process called metastasis. Once breast cancer has spread, it is considered incurable. Dr. Wulf and her colleagues are seeking strategies to improve treatments for women with metastatic breast cancer. To accomplish this, they are testing combination therapies and seeking biomarkers that can predict responses. The team aims to translate the studies’ results to the clinic to improve the survival of patients with metastatic TNBC.
PARP inhibitors are approved for treatment of BRCA-driven breast cancers, but they may also be useful in other patients. Dr. Wulf and her team have discovered that mutations in KMT2C, a tumor-suppressing gene which can drive a greater likelihood of metastasis, are sensitive to PARP inhibitors.
The team will test PARP-inhibitor combination therapies on KMT2C mutant models in the laboratory and have proposed a clinical trial further investigating KMT2C-mutant breast cancer. They are collaborating with colleagues in academia and a biotechnology company to explore novel ways to instigate the immune system to amplify the efficacy of PARP inhibitors against TNBC. Through her translational work, Dr. Wulf and her team are identifying new biomarkers and pursuing combination therapies that can improve treatment responses and provide new treatment options to patients.
Gerburg Wulf, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Attending Physician in the Breast Oncology Group at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center (DFHCC). She received her medical school and graduate training in Germany where she studied in Muenster and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Munich. After a residency at the University in Heidelberg, she came to the US in 1991 for a post-doctoral research fellowship in Hematology at Beth Israel Hospital. She received further post-graduate training at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center (Internal Medicine) and at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (clinical Hematology/Oncology), as well as a second post-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Cell Biology with Dr. Kun Ping Lu.
Her current professional work is a combination of clinical practice and laboratory-based research. As a board-certified oncologist, Dr. Wulf serves breast cancer patients from the greater Boston area in the Multidisciplinary Breast Cancer Clinic at BIDMC. She is an active clinical scientist and an NCI, ECOG and DFHCC investigator. Her focus is laboratory-based research where she is interested in novel treatment concepts for endocrine-resistant breast cancer. She has collaborated closely with BCRF Investigator Dr. Lewis Cantley (who discovered the PI3 kinase pathway) to develop and test preclinical models for assessing novel combination treatments that include the use of a PI3K inhibitors.
2011
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