Lajos Pusztai, MD, DPhil
Yale School of Medicine
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven, Connecticut
Titles and Affiliations
Professor of Medicine
Chief, Breast Medical Oncology
Co-Director, Yale Cancer Center Genetics and Genomics Program
Member, BCRF Scientific Advisory Board
Research area
Identifying combination treatments that will improve the effectiveness of immunotherapy in patients with aggressive breast cancers.
Impact
The immune system plays an important role in the progression of primary breast cancer to metastatic breast cancer. Dr. Pusztai is conducting studies to assess the immune cell composition of primary and metastatic breast cancer to examine the changes that chemotherapy causes in the tumor genome and tumor -immune environment. Identifying and understanding the mechanisms of immunosuppression and immune evasion will provide the foundation for immunotherapy combination therapies that could provide patients with more effective therapeutic options.
Progress Thus Far
Dr. Pusztai and his team have identified a subset of patients with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancers who benefited from immune checkpoint therapy before surgery. These patients include those who have the highest risk scores measured by the routinely used prognostic MammaPrint™ assay. This observation led to a new clinical trial for patents who have very high MammaPrint™ scores that will launch in 2022. While studying genes present in breast cancer cells, Dr. Pusztai’s team discovered several enzymes whose function is essential for cancer cell survival.
What's next
Dr. Pusztai is now testing molecules that block these enzymes to assess their therapeutic potential in pre-clinical breast cancer models. He and his team will study how their most promising drug candidate inhibits breast cancer growth and whether it could be combined with other anticancer therapies to improve efficacy. They are also developing a novel antibody that targets a molecule on the surface of cancer cells and will test if it inhibits the growth of cancer cells.
Biography
Lajos Pusztai, MD, DPhil is Professor of Medicine at Yale University and Chief of the Breast Medical Oncology Section at the Yale Cancer Center. He is also Co-Director of the Cancer Center Genomics and Genetics Program. Dr. Pusztai received his medical degree from the Semmelweis University of Medicine in Budapest, and his DPhil. degree from the University of Oxford in England.
His research group has made important contributions to establish that estrogen receptor-positive and-negative breast cancers have fundamentally different molecular, clinical and epidemiological risk characteristics. He has been a pioneer in evaluating gene expression profiling as a diagnostic technology to predict chemotherapy and endocrine therapy sensitivity and have shown that different biological processes are involved in determining the prognosis and treatment response in different breast cancer subtypes. His group has also developed new bioinformatics tools to integrate information from across different data platforms in order to define the molecular pathways that are significantly disturbed in individual cancers and could provide the bases for future individualized treatment strategies. He made important contributions to clarify the clinical value of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in different breast cancer subtypes.
Dr. Pusztai is also principal investigator of several clinical trials investigating new drugs and potential response markers. He has published over 200 manuscripts in high impact medical journals and is the Clinical Editor of the British Journal of Cancer, Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Member of the Breast Cancer Steering Committee of the NCI and Co-Chair of the Trans-ALTTO Committee that oversees the translational research projects of tissues collected during two larger randomized clinical trials (ALTTO and NeoALTTO). He is also Chair of the Data Safety Monitoring Committee of the OPTIMA trial.
