University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus Denver, Colorado
Professor, Department of Pathology
Discovering ways to improve treatment response in patients with estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.
Breast cancers that are driven by estrogen—called estrogen receptor (ER)-positive, have the best five-year prognosis of any breast cancer. Despite effective therapies to treat ER-positive breast cancer, one-quarter to one-third of patients will experience a breast cancer recurrence. The goal of Drs. Sartorius’ and Horwitz’s BCRF research is to identify and test vulnerabilities in a common but understudied group of cells in ER-positive tumors that are ER-negative. This population of cells may be responsible for drug resistance and recurrence and behaves like cancer stem cells, which can initiate and drive cancer progression. By understanding how these cells promote tumor growth and identifying their weaknesses, they hope to identify strategies to turn them off and prevent recurrence.
In the last year, Drs. Sartorius and Horwitz finished developing endocrine and drug resistant variants of ER-positive breast cancer from their new breast cancer model system. The team has identified prospective mechanisms for expansion of ER-negative “stem cell” populations that may drive tumor progression and have found that these cells often increase in number during the course of hormonal therapies, can adapt to the stress of long-term exposure to hormone therapies, and can interact with other cells that enable their travel through the bloodstream to form sites of metastases.
The team will use their ER-positive breast cancer model to address mechanisms of ER-negative cells in tumors and metastasis. Their goal is to identify how long-term estrogen-targeting therapies impact the ER-negative “stem cell” population in tumors to promote metastasis.
Carol Sartorius, PhD earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and PhD from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, both in Molecular Biology. She did her postdoctoral work at the University of Colorado Boulder and is currently a Professor of Pathology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (UC-AMC).
Dr. Sartorius’s research studies the biology, progression, and endocrine resistance of hormone receptor positive breast cancer. Her laboratory seeks to understand the molecular basis of transcriptional regulation by progesterone receptors (PR) and how this impacts estrogen receptors (ER) and tumor cell phenotype. Current research topics include hormone regulation of cancer stem cells and tumor heterogeneity, hormone regulation of metastasis, hormone control of translation and protein synthesis, and how host obesity and metabolic syndrome specifically affect ER-positive breast cancer and endocrine resistance. Dr. Sartorius’s team also specializes in developing hormone-dependent breast cancer models. She is the co-founder and co-director (with Dr. Peter Kabos) of the breast cancer patient-derived xenograft (PDX) bank at UC-AMC. Their collection emphasizes ER and PR-positive tumors. These tumor models are being characterized by genomic and proteomic techniques to discover novel hormone receptor interactions that can be leveraged for treatment. The goal is to improve hormone-directed therapies for breast cancer.
She is an active member of the Cancer Biology Training Program at UC-AMC with an interest in training the next generation of scientists in the field of hormones and cancer. Her laboratory trains predoctoral students, and postdoctoral and clinical fellows.
2017
University of Colorado Denver, Colorado
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