Titles and Affiliations
Member
Department of Oncology
Research Area
Exploring how natural biological events impact breast cancer risk and developing strategies to prevent breast cancer in younger women.
Impact
Breast cancer incidence is rising in younger women. Despite advances in treatment, we still do not fully understand why breast cancer develops in younger women—or how to stop it before it starts. Dr. dos Santos explores how natural events in a woman’s life—such as pregnancies or common infections—might influence breast cancer risk. She and her team have discovered that during pregnancy, the immune system produces special antibodies that appear to recognize and respond to the earliest signs of breast cancer. These antibodies could potentially offer a natural form of protection, acting much like a vaccine to prevent cancer from taking hold. The team has also found that laboratory models of urinary tract infections (UTIs), which are particularly common in younger women, have increased levels of a protein called TIMP1 in their blood. When elevated, this protein leads to changes in breast tissue that create a more favorable environment for cancer to develop. When they blocked this protein, it significantly delayed cancer development.
Progress Thus Far
Using multiple breast cancer models, Dr. dos Santos and her team confirmed that pregnancy generates specialized antibodies that recognize abnormal mammary cells and can suppress tumor growth without disrupting normal breast development, suggesting that pregnancy may “train” the immune system and help prevent breast cancer. Extending their work on (UTIs) and TIMP1 to humans, the team found that women who carry BRCA1 mutations are more likely to experience urinary tract-related diseases, that women with a history of UTIs have a modestly increased risk of breast cancer and that elevated TIMP1 levels in healthy BRCA1 carriers are associated with increased risk. Together, these findings suggest that pregnancy may offer natural, immune-based protection against breast cancer, while chronic inflammatory exposures like UTIs may increase susceptibility, pointing to new opportunities to intercept breast cancer early through protective antibodies, inflammatory biomarkers, and tailored prevention strategies.
What’s Next
Dr. dos Santos and her team will test whether pregnancy-related antibodies can prevent breast cancer in laboratory models and whether they can detect early changes in human breast tissue. The team will use single-cell sequencing to identify the specific targets that these pregnancy-induced antibodies recognize. While this research is focused on younger women, the findings could benefit all women by uncovering novel strategies for cancer prevention and risk detection.
Biography
Camila dos Santos, PhD is an Associate Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Dr. dos Santos has dedicated her research to uncovering how physiological experiences—such as pregnancy, infection, and hormonal transitions—reshape the mammary gland and influence breast cancer risk in young women. She uses molecular and cellular tools to uncover how these events alter breast cells, with a focus on mechanisms that promote or suppress tumor initiation. They discovered that pregnancy induces lasting changes in mammary epithelial cells by modifying chromatin accessibility, transcriptional identity, tissue stiffness, and breast immunity. More recently, they showed that systemic infections, such as urinary tract infections (UTIs), accelerate tumorigenesis in BRCA1-mutant mice by remodeling the mammary microenvironment and expanding tumor-initiating basal-luminal progenitors. This work highlights how non-mammary insults indirectly drive breast cancer risk through immune and stromal crosstalk. Their approaches integrate organoid cultures, mouse models, chromatin profiling, and single-cell technologies to define how reproductive and immune history shape mammary cell fate. By understanding how normal development and external stressors intersect with genetic susceptibility, Dr. dos Santos group aims to identify new biomarkers and prevention strategies for breast cancer in young women—especially those not captured by traditional risk models.
For her research in normal breast development and breast cancer, she has been granted a series of prestigious awards, including the Rita Allen Foundation Award (2016), the V-Foundation for Cancer Research Award (2016), the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Award (2018), the AACR-Breast Cancer Research Foundation Young Investigator Award (2018), and the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Faculty Award (2021), the Breast Cancer Alliance Award (2023), and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation Award (2023, 2025).
