Yale School of Medicine New Haven, Connecticut
Professor of Medicine Chief, Breast Medical Oncology Co-Director, Yale Cancer Center Genetics and Genomics Program
Identifying predictors of immunotherapy benefit and novel therapeutic targets in patients with aggressive breast cancer.
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive subtype, and advanced forms are often treated with a combination of immunotherapy and chemotherapy. Immunotherapy helps a patient’s own immune system fight cancer and can be very effective, but not every patient benefits. Dr. Pusztai and his team are identifying patients with TNBC who have residual cancer after presurgical chemotherapy who may benefit from postoperative (adjuvant) immunotherapy. They are also identifying new drug targets and developing promising new therapeutics for aggressive breast cancer.
As part of the SWOG S1418/BR006 trial evaluating immunotherapy as adjuvant therapy in TNBC, Dr. Pusztai and colleagues are testing biomarkers that may define this population. In other work, they are developing new drugs that target metabolic vulnerabilities in tumor cells. One compound that inhibits a metabolic enzyme has been identified and may enter clinical testing soon. They are also testing a new antibody drug conjugate (ADC) that targets GABRP, a protein that is highly expressed in triple-negative breast cancer but is expressed in low levels in normal tissue.
Dr. Pusztai and his team are analyzing biomarker data from SWOG S1418/BR006 as it becomes available. In their drug discovery work, the team will continue to refine their compounds in preparation for clinical trial testing and conduct additional screening for novel ADC targets.
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.
2002
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