Titles and Affiliations
Professor of Internal Medicine and Epidemiology
Director, Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk Evaluation Program
Research area
Identifying new strategies for the prevention and treatment of aggressive breast cancers.
Impact
Aggressive breast cancers such as inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), subsets of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), and others that rapidly progress have acquired the ability to promote cancer cell motility throughout the body and resist therapies, characteristics known to promote metastasis. By studying these molecular adaptations, Dr. Merajver and her team devised potential new avenues to attack aggressive cancer cells. They hope to be able to guide therapies for patients diagnosed with aggressive breast cancers in the US and worldwide, especially as TNBC and IBC disproportionately burden underserved populations and have higher incidence in individuals of African ancestry.
Progress Thus Far
Dr. Merajver and her team seek to understand how cancer cells change their energy use and internal signaling in ways that help them travel through the bloodstream and spread to other organs. Building on their identification of a key enzyme, ME2, that drives cancer aggressiveness in TNBC and IBC, the team has continued expanding a growing set of laboratory models to study these aggressive cancers. Using these models, alongside a real-time platform that can test an array of drugs, the team has spent the past year characterizing how these tumor models respond to different treatments.
What’s next
The team will apply what they’ve learned to test new drug combinations in the most aggressive forms of primary breast cancer and brain metastases, including approaches that target the unique metabolism of these cancer cells. They will also continue to refine their machine learning tools for predicting brain metastases, and work to determine how reliably their real-time drug-testing platform can predict which treatments will work for a given patient. Together, this research aims to give patients and their care teams a data-driven way to rank which therapies are most likely to help as their cancer progresses.
Biography
Sofia D. Merajver, MD, PhD is a physician scientist with a translational focus on integrating molecular genetics of breast cancer with fundamental studies of the dynamics of cancer signal transduction into innovative clinical strategies for women at high risk for breast cancer and cancer patients. As Director of the Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk Evaluation Program and as Scientific Director of the Breast Oncology Program, she is engaged with clinical translational research that tests molecular, engineering, and educational interventions for cancer patients. From 2010-2013 she served as Director of the University of Michigan Center for Global Health, a university-wide, cross-disciplinary global health translational research project to ameliorate health disparities in the US and globally. Her research in the molecular biology of cancer and aggressive cancer phenotypes encompasses work on the role of Rho and other signaling and cytoskeletal proteins in cancer cell invasion and motility, the role of copper in angiogenesis, and metabolism and signal transduction in cancer. Her research laboratory has collaborated with systems biologists and modelers for over 7 years on projects that focused on the fundamental structure of information transmission in cellular signal transduction cascades. This work has brought together physicists, electrical engineers, biological chemists, cell biologists, and oncologists working on different aspects of the problem both from a theoretical standpoint and for the experimental testing of the models’ predictions. In the Merajver laboratory, teams of molecular biologists are working alongside faculty and students in mathematics, bioinformatics, and engineering to model and understand the details of single cell motion and the key signaling intermediates that determine the switch between motion and proliferation, both structurally and metabolically.
