Charlotte Kuperwasser, PhD
Tufts University
Boston, Massachusetts
Boston, Massachusetts
Titles and Affiliations
Professor, Department of Developmental, Molecular, and Chemical Biology
Director, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Laboratory for the Convergence of Biomedical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences
Investigator, Molecular Oncology Research Institute
Research area
Understanding how breast cells lose their ability to respond to normal growth signals and become cancerous cells.
Impact
Breast cancer is a disease of dysfunctional tissue identity whereby cells no longer respond to normal growth signals and instead grow out of control. These cells can even acquire properties associated with different tissue types. In fact, the less breast cancers resemble normal breast tissue, the more aggressive they are. Dr. Kuperwasser and her colleagues have engineered a 3D model system of breast tissue to allow them to study how stem cells, specialized cells that can regenerate into other cell types, receive and transmit growth signals. Understanding this process is key to understanding how it becomes corrupted leading to the development of cancer. Using this specialized model system, they have identified genes that cause breast cells to lose their identity. Her team will study how these genes work in order to shed light on the earliest events in cancer development. She hopes that these studies will provide new therapeutic targets for treating breast cancer and possibly reveal new ways to prevent it.
Progress Thus Far
Dr. Kuperwasser and her team have demonstrated that the 3D model they developed recapitulates the environment of breast tissue and can be used to study the transformation of stem cells to proliferative cells. In the last year, they engineered other 3D models using tissue isolated from women with and without BRCA1 mutations. In preliminary studies, Dr. Kuperwasser observed that BRCA1 tissues grow in a pattern that is distinct from normal tissue.
What's next
The team will continue to utilize the 3D models to investigate the factors that contribute to the defects in morphogenesis in the process of tumor formation of BRCA1-mutant tumors Dr. Kuperwasser anticipates these studies will provide key insights into why BRCA1 mutation carriers develop cancer so rapidly and identify potential targets to prevent tumor formation.
Biography
Charlotte Kuperwasser, PhD is the Director of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Laboratory for the Convergence of Biomedical, Physical and Engineering Sciences at Tufts University School of Medicine. She is an Associate Professor Developmental, Molecular & Chemical Biology and an investigator at the Molecular Oncology Research Institute (MORI) at Tufts Medical Center. She is a national and internationally recognized expert in the fields of mammary gland biology and breast cancer.
Dr. Kuperwasser has made seminal contributions in the field of mammary gland development, breast cancer, stromal-epithelial cell biology, and stem cells. Her major scientific achievements include the creation of innovative and novel humanized laboratory models to study normal and cancer development as well as metastasis. Using these models, she was the first to enumerate the cellular origins of human breast cancer and model BRCA1-mutation in humans. Dr. Kuperwasser has also made seminal achievements in identifying and characterizing normal and cancer stem cells (CSCs) as well as enumerating the master regulators that control stem cells and cell fate decisions in the breast.
Dr. Kuperwasser received her PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and was a Jane Coffin Child's Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. Dr. Kuperwasser has been a Howard Hughes Fellow, a Merck Fellow and received several awards including the COG/Aventis Young Investigator Award, the Raymond & Beverly Sackler Award, and the Natalie V. Zucker Award.
