Evanthia Roussos Torres, MD, PhD

Investigating tumor immune suppression in Hispanic/Latino women with breast cancer and links to social determinants of health.

Impact

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death among women in the United States. Immunotherapy retrains the body’s own immune system to fight cancer and leads to long-lasting responses, but unfortunately few patients with breast cancer currently benefit. One reason for limited response is high levels of immune suppression within breast tumors. A better understanding of ways to target immune suppression could help improve responses among all patients. Racial and ethnic differences are among some of the social determinants of health (SDOH) that could also contribute to differences in immune response in breast cancer as they have known associations with differences in rate of diagnosis and survival. Better characterization of immune suppression linked with race, ethnicity, and other SDOH could identify differences that may guide the design of personalized therapies and influence screening for clinical trials.

What’s next

Dr. Roussos Torres’ research focus is to investigate the breast tumors of Hispanic/Latinos (H/L) women with breast cancer and determine if they are more immune suppressed as compared to Non-Hispanic White (NHW) women. She and her team will also collect information on patients’ SDOH and determine whether there is a correlation with their immune profiles. The team will identify the immune cells within tumors and in blood and categorize them as contributing to an anti-tumor versus pro-tumor response based on the genes and proteins they express and aim to determine whether there are differences in immune cells and their genes and proteins that are unique to tumors of H/L patients. This work has the potential to personalize drug development for the H/L breast cancer community for whom specialized treatments do not yet exist and could provide new screening tools for clinical trials that will help this group of patients toward therapies to which their tumors may have a higher likelihood for response.