Harvard Medical School Boston, Massachusetts
Julia Dyckman Andrus Professor of Surgery Director, Vascular Biology Program Boston Children’s Hospital
Understanding and targeting the underlying biology driving breast cancer metastasis.
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) has a high rate of metastasis to the brain. TNBC cells release extracellular vesicles (EVs), which are small capsules that can cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and facilitate TNBC brain metastases. Dr. Moses and her team have recently made key discoveries about the molecular pathways through which EVs interact with brain epithelial cells and modulate their metabolism to facilitate their transport across the BBB. The team is now investigating how EVs influence the brain environment to become hospitable to cancer. Dr. Moses aims to understand why and how breast cancer cells travel to distant sites and establish metastases and how to target these cells to treat advanced disease.
Dr. Moses is developing novel, targeted nanomedicines, drugs encapsulated in microscopic particles, for the treatment of TNBC based on precision targets identified by her laboratory. They recently published work on the development of a highly effective targeted nano-based treatment for late-stage and refractory TNBC. They are now developing bispecific antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) that target both the cancer cells and the tumor promoting immune components of TNBC and other breast cancer types.
Over the coming year, Dr. Moses and her team will continue their work developing precision medicines to target breast cancer as well as extend their studies on breast-to-brain metastasis to understand the role of EVs in metastasis to bone, another common metastatic site of breast cancer. Current therapies can limit tumor progression to bone but do not necessarily improve outcomes. Dr. Moses aims to better understand the mechanisms underlying breast-to-bone metastasis to ultimately improve the treatment and prevention of bone metastasis as well as to monitor disease progression and therapeutic efficacy.
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.
2008
The Hale Family Award
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