Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Boston, Massachusetts
Associate Professor and Attending Physician Harvard Medical School
Identifying novel treatment combinations for metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive form of breast cancer with few treatment options, and a high likelihood of spreading to other organs of the body—a process called metastasis. Once breast cancer has spread, it is considered incurable. Dr. Wulf and her colleagues are seeking strategies to improve treatments for women with metastatic breast cancer. To accomplish this, they are testing combination therapies, and seeking biomarkers that can predict responses. The results of these studies will ultimately be translated to the clinic to improve the survival of patients with metastatic TNBC.
PARP inhibitors are helpful in BRCA-driven breast cancers, but they may also be useful in other patients with DNA-repair deficiencies—it is just a matter of finding those patients. To that end, the team has published a specific mutational signature that they discovered can predict response to a combination PARP inhibitor and PI3K inhibitor in breast cancer. PI3K is an intracellular signaling pathway that is mutated or amplified in many cancers.
The Wulf team is launching a clinical trial in which they will investigate whether metabolic markers in the blood of patients can predict a response to a combination therapy of PARP and PI3K inhibitors. This treatment combination has shown promise in treating TNBC by shutting down more than one DNA repair pathway. They will further investigate the role of mutations in a key gene that regulates PARP inhibitor sensitivity and continue their studies of how PARP-inhibitors reprogram the immune system, all in pursuit of identifying biomarkers and new combination therapies to improve treatments of TNBC.
Dr. Gerburg Wulf is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Attending Physician in the Breast Oncology Group at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center (DFHCC). She received her medical school and graduate training in Germany where she studied in Muenster and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Munich. After a residency at the University in Heidelberg, she came to the US in 1991 for a post-doctoral research fellowship in Hematology at Beth Israel Hospital. She received further post-graduate training at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center (Internal Medicine) and at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (clinical Hematology/Oncology), as well as a second post-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Cell Biology with Dr. Kun Ping Lu.
Her current professional work is a combination of clinical practice and laboratory-based research. As a board-certified oncologist, Dr. Wulf serves breast cancer patients from the greater Boston area in the Multidisciplinary Breast Cancer Clinic at BIDMC. She is an active clinical scientist and an NCI, ECOG and DFHCC investigator. Her focus is laboratory-based research where she is interested in novel treatment concepts for endocrine-resistant breast cancer. She has collaborated closely with Dr. Lewis Cantley (who discovered the PI3 kinase pathway) to develop and test preclinical models for assessing novel combination treatments that include the use of a PI3K inhibitors.
2011
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