Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
New York, New York
Chief of Breast Surgery, Mount Sinai Health System Director of Dubin Cancer Center, Mount Sinai Hospital Associate Attending, Tisch Cancer Institute
Developing new treatments for drug-resistant hormone receptor-positive breast cancer.
Most breast cancers are hormone receptor (HR)-positive, and while many patients respond well to standard treatments, some cancers become drug resistant 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.
Drs. Port and Irie 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.
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.
Elisa Port, MD, FACS is the Chief of Breast Surgery and the Director of the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai Hospital. She is also the Associate Attending Physician in the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount-Sinai School of Medicine. After receiving her medical degree from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1992, Dr. Port was a general surgery resident at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She then joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for a breast cancer surgery research fellowship, and later completed a general surgery residency at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. She is currently working on developing research protocols for investigating the use of avatar models in triple negative breast cancer. Her clinical research work involves investigating and characterizing the role of MRI, 3D mammography, and patient decision making in breast cancer screening and surgery. Dr. Port has an active practice and performs hundreds of operations each year. She is an expert in sentinel-node biopsy, nipple sparing mastectomy, as well as the use of breast MRI in high-risk patients. She is also a member of several professional associations, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society of Breast Diseases, the Society of Surgical Oncology, and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.
“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.”
2014
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai New York, New York
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