Charles M. Perou, PhD

Using cutting-edge sequencing technologies and artificial intelligence to better understand the complexity of breast cancer and improve personalized medicine.

Impact

The goal of personalized medicine is to find the right therapy for each patient, based on the unique features driving that individual’s tumor growth. Tumors can vary widely between patients for several reasons: inherited genetic differences, mutations and genetic changes that develop during a patient’s lifetime, or the composition of the tumor microenvironment—the cells, structures, and molecules that surround a tumor and affect its progression. All contribute to the tumor’s susceptibility to therapies. Dr. Perou and his team employ technologies that analyze genetic information from individual cells (single cell sequencing). This allows for more precise characterization of all cells, including immune cells that infiltrate the tumor, and provides a picture of which cells are present. Dr. Perou’s long-term goal is to improve therapies and the accuracy of prognoses.

Progress Thus Far

Dr. Perou and his team have recently shown that loss of immune surveillance proteins on the surface of immune cells contributes to tumor evasion of immune attack. The team has created a tumor model system that mimics the loss of immune surveillance proteins and are now testing these tumor models for changes in the immune microenvironment, resistance to immune targeting, and increased metastatic potential. In addition, Dr. Perou has made progress in developing new computational models that can predict how a tumor will respond to treatment, and thus patient outcomes, and can identify groups of genes that may give insight into interactions in the cell that drive metastasis. The team is using these tools to analyze a large set of clinical data from patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) data, which is particularly aggressive and has a higher propensity to metastasize than other breast cancer subtypes.

What’s Next

In the coming year, Dr. Perou and his team will build a new dataset of paired primary tumors and metastases with the goal of analyzing the genetic differences between 50 pairs over the next one to two years. The team will also utilize their immune surveillance tumor model system to delineate the genes involved in the loss of immune markers on the cell surface and the effect on tumor cells and the immune microenvironment.

Read more about BCRF’s Health Equity Initiative here.