Titles and Affiliations
Professor of Medicine, Hematology and Oncology
Dudley and Tina Sharp Chair for Cancer Research
Founding Director Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center
Research area
Identifying drivers of resistance and new treatment strategies in advanced estrogen receptor-positive and HER2-positive breast cancers.
Impact
While treatments for estrogen receptor (ER)-positive and HER2-positive breast cancers have greatly improved outcomes for patients, many still experience disease progression when their cancers develop resistance. These resistant cancers can spread, leading to worse outcomes and limited treatment options. By identifying how resistance develops, researchers can design more effective treatments that prevent recurrence and improve survival. Drs. Osborne and Schiff and their teams conduct laboratory and clinical studies to understand resistance to endocrine and anti-HER2 therapy and develop new treatment strategies to overcome it. They have a growing panel of sophisticated experimental models of drug resistance and metastasis, as well as data from clinical specimens—valuable resources to advance the understanding of the molecular drivers of drug resistance that can be shared with the wider research community.
Progress Thus Far
In the past several years, the research group has used their growing panel of diverse and clinically relevant models to reveal several mechanisms of resistance to ER- and HER2-targeted therapies. In HER2-positive breast cancer, resistance often occurs through reactivation of HER pathways or alternative signaling, but combinations of HER2 targeting drugs and inhibitors of growth factors can restore sensitivity. Importantly, their work has also revealed ways to enhance the effectiveness of promising drugs like tucatinib (Tukysa®) and trastuzumab deruxtecan (Enhertu®).
What’s next
In the coming year, the lab will deepen its studies on specific pathways and proteins to better understand how they drive resistance. They plan to test new treatment combinations, and they will also develop additional drug-resistant models of brain metastasis and HER2-low cancers to uncover new therapeutic vulnerabilities. Lastly, they will evaluate personalized immunotherapeutic strategies to tackle drug-resistant disease and improve patient outcomes.
Biography
C. Kent Osborne, MD received his AB and his MD from the University of Missouri, both with honors. He completed his internship and residency at Johns Hopkins and followed this with three years as a Clinical Associate at the Medicine Branch of the National Cancer Institute. He was a faculty member at the University of Texas Health Science Center from 1977 until 1999 and became Chief of Medical Oncology in 1992. In 1999, Dr. Osborne moved to Baylor College of Medicine to direct a new Breast Center and in 2004 was named Director of the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor.
Dr. Osborne’s research interests have focused on the biology and treatment of breast cancer. He has published extensively on the role of growth factors in breast cancer pathogenesis and has also investigated the mechanisms of action and resistance to ER and HER2 targeted therapies in breast cancer. Dr. Osborne currently directs the Baylor Breast Cancer Specialized Program of Research Excellence Grant, and he has authored more than 400 manuscripts on the biology and treatment of breast cancer.
