Titles and Affiliations
Chief of Breast Surgery, Mount Sinai Health System
Director of Dubin Cancer Center, Mount Sinai Hospital
Associate Attending, Tisch Cancer Institute
Research area
Developing new treatments for drug-resistant hormone receptor-positive breast cancer.
Impact
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.
Progress Thus Far
Drs. Port and Irie are developing two approaches to address drug-resistant HR-positive breast cancer. First, they identified a gene called PTK6 as an important driver of resistance to anti-estrogen therapy. They have developed first-in-class “degrader” drugs that reduce PTK6 levels in cancer cells, causing them to die. These degraders have shown strong anti-tumor activity in laboratory models. Second, a gene called MYC drives resistance to both anti-estrogen therapy and CDK4/6 inhibitors in a subset of HR-positive breast cancers. The team developed a new compound that targets a unique vulnerability tied to how MYC-expressing cancer cells generate energy and survive. This compound effectively kills HR-positive cancer cells that have become resistant to standard treatments.
What’s next
The team will test both the PTK6 degraders and the MYC-targeting compound using laboratory models developed from patient tumors. These studies will help them better understand how the treatments work and assess how well they stop tumor growth in drug-resistant cancers. They will also optimize the PTK6-targeting degraders for future clinical trials and further investigate how the compound’s target contributes 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.
Biography
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.”
