Titles and Affiliations
Associate Professor of Medicine and Oncological Sciences
Research area
Developing new treatments for drug-resistant hormone receptor-positive breast cancer.
Impact
Most breast cancers are hormone receptor (HR)-positive, and while many patients respond well to standard treatments, some cancers become resistant to therapies and continue to grow and spread. Understanding why resistance develops and finding new ways to overcome it are major areas of research, since resistant HR-positive breast cancers are harder to treat and often require more aggressive therapies.
Progress Thus Far
Drs. Irie and Port are developing two new drugs to address drug-resistant HR-positive breast cancer. One degrades a cancer-promoting gene called PTK6, and another called narazaciclib may overcome resistance related to a gene called myc. These promising therapies have shown success in laboratory models and could lead to more effective treatments that extend life and improve outcomes for patients with drug-resistant HR-positive breast cancer.
What’s next
In the next year, they will test these two compounds using models developed from real patient tumors. These studies will help them better understand how the drugs work and assess how well they stop tumor growth in cancers resistant to current therapies. They will also optimize the PTK6-targeting drug for future clinical trials and investigate how narazaciclib’s targets contribute to cancer cell survival. If successful, this work will lay the foundation for new treatment options for patients with metastatic, drug-resistant HR-positive breast cancer.
Biography
Hanna Irie, MD, PhD is Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology and in the Department of Oncological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. She received her MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School and completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, followed by a clinical fellowship in Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The focus of her research is to identify and validate novel therapeutic strategies for high risk and metastatic breast cancer. Recent research efforts have focused on oncogenes that regulate ephithelial-mesenchymal transition, drug resistance and metastases of breast cancer cells. Her laboratory collaborates with chemical biologists to develop and validate novel therapeutics targeting oncogenes and pathways. She and Dr. Port have worked on the generation of novel patient-derived estrogen receptor (ER)-positive and triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) models that enable validation of novel therapeutics. Their work further investigates biomarkers of chemotherapy and immunotherapy resistance to complement validation of these novel therapeutics. She and Dr. Port serve as co-PIs of the Mount Sinai Breast Tumor Biospecimen Repository which has banked over 500 breast tumor specimens.
“If not for BCRF, we would not have been able to take on the challenges associated with developing novel therapeutics for triple-negative breast cancer, from identification of new gene targets to drug design and validation.”
