Titles and Affiliations
Julia Dyckman Andrus Professor of Surgery
Director, Vascular Biology Program
Boston Children’s Hospital
Research area
Understanding and targeting the underlying biology driving breast cancer metastasis.
Impact
Dr. Moses’ research spans the entire lifetime of a breast tumor, from its earliest stage of development, when it first acquires its own blood supply and becomes capable of growing, through its progression and, in some cases, spread to distant sites in the body. Her work is grounded in understanding these underlying biological mechanisms, and she is applying this foundational knowledge, combined with cutting-edge tools across multiple disciplines, to develop precision nanomedicines that specifically target breast cancer cells and non-invasive tests that can diagnose and predict the course of the disease. This work spans several related fronts: developing targeted drug delivery systems designed to treat both primary and metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), identifying and targeting obesity-related factors that influence how breast cancer develops and progresses, and building non-invasive diagnostic tests around validated biomarkers.
Progress Thus Far
Dr. Moses’ team has continued to advance several interconnected lines of research this year, each addressing a different stage of breast cancer’s development and spread:
- Tumor dormancy and blood supply: Building on the team’s foundational work showing that small, early-stage tumors remain dormant until they recruit their own blood supply through angiogenesis, the team continues to study the genes and proteins that allow tumors and metastases to escape this dormant state and become actively growing.
- Metastasis to the brain and bone: The team has shown that extracellular vesicles (EVs) can alter the blood-brain barrier to help cancer cells invade the brain. They have identified specific molecular changes in brain blood vessel cells that could serve as early warning signs or therapeutic targets. The team has extended this work to bone, finding that EVs from bone-targeting cancer cells carry molecular cargo that helps prepare bone tissue for future tumor growth, offering the first direct evidence that cancer-derived EVs can selectively reach and affect bone.
- Obesity and breast cancer risk: The team continues to investigate how obesity contributes to breast cancer risk after menopause, studying how excess weight alters gene activity, protein expression, and fat metabolism in breast cancer cells in ways that may promote more aggressive disease.
- Targeted drug development: The team is developing and validating a novel bispecific antibody-drug conjugate designed to target and kill TNBC cells, based on precision targets identified in the laboratory.
- Non-invasive biomarkers: The team has continued to validate a panel of novel urinary proteins capable of detecting the presence of breast cancer, tracking its progression and metastasis, and identifying risk marker lesions, offering a non-invasive path to catching disease progression earlier than current methods allow.
What’s next
Over the coming year, Dr. Moses and her team will continue advancing several key research areas: 1. Understanding how breast cancer cell-derived EVs contribute to metastasis to the brain and bone, with the goal of disrupting these pathways to prevent disease spread; 2. Exploring how obesity and menopause together influence breast cancer development and progression; ,3. Metabolic profiling to uncover obesity-related metabolites or pathways that could serve as therapeutic or diagnostic targets; 4 Expand their development of immune-activating bispecific antibody-drug conjugates for treating TNBC.; 5. Continue building a novel point-of-need device designed to monitor their noninvasive urinary biomarkers, moving this biomarker closer to real-world clinical use.
Biography
Dr. Marsha A. Moses is the Julia Dyckman Andrus Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Director of the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. She is internationally recognized for her significant contributions to our understanding of the biochemical and molecular mechanisms that underlie the regulation of tumor development and progression. Dr. Moses and her laboratory have discovered several inhibitors of these processes that function at both the transcriptional and translational level, some of which are being developed for potential clinical use in a variety of human diseases. Named a pioneer in the field of Biomarker Medicine by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, she created a Proteomics Initiative at Boston Children’s Hospital, has utilized its resources, including an extensive human biorepository and has leveraged her significant expertise in proteomics, to discover and validate a number of novel, non-invasive biomarkers for a variety of human cancers and non-neoplastic diseases. Several of these biomarkers are currently being used in clinical trials. Dr. Moses and her team have engineered novel, actively targeted, precision nanomedicines for the treatment of human cancers and their metastases. A number of these therapeutics and diagnostics are included in Dr. Moses’ significant patent portfolio composed of both US and foreign patents.
Dr. Moses’ basic and translational work has been published in such journals as Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, PNAS and Nature Communications, among others. She received a Ph.D.in Biochemistry from Boston University and completed a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital and MIT in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Langer. Dr. Moses is the recipient of a number of NIH and foundation grants and numerous awards and honors. Most recently, she was the 2021 recipient of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)-Women in Cancer Research Charlotte Friend Lectureship. Dr. Moses has been recognized with both of Harvard Medical School’s mentoring awards, the A. Clifford Barger Mentoring Award and the Joseph B. Martin Dean’s Leadership Award for the Advancement of Women Faculty. Marsha has received the Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Postdoc Association of Boston Children’s Hospital and has also received their Award for Exceptional Mentorship. She has also received the Honorary Member Mentoring Award from the Association of Women Surgeons of the American College of Surgeons.
Dr. Moses has been elected to the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) of the National Academies of the United States, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
