I am a research-focused, board-certified Anatomic and Clinical pathologist at Vanderbilt University with specialized training in the molecular pathology of breast cancer.
I began my research career as a post-baccalaureate cancer research fellow in the laboratory of Louis Staudt at the National Cancer Institute. This work in diffuse large B cell lymphoma, published in Nature in 2000 and validated in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2002, was the first to segregate clinically and molecularly distinct subtypes of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma based on gene expression. During my doctoral training, I developed multiplexed fluorescent assays to characterize the proteomic profile of the ERBB and PI3-kinase signaling pathways in large breast carcinoma cohorts and correlated the results to patient diagnosis, prognosis and response to targeted therapies, in the laboratory of David L. Rimm at Yale University.
I am continuing my career at Vanderbilt with a focus on biomarker discovery and validation for the prediction of treatment resistance and recurrence in breast cancer in the Carlos Arteaga laboratory. I have utilized the accrued tissue in the BRE0776 presurgical letrozole trial in order to study of mechanisms of resistance to endocrine therapy. Through multi-platform molecular profiling, I hope to identify actionable somatic alterations and uncover additional therapeutic liabilities for improved diagnosis and treatment of early breast cancer. A long-term goal is to develop a cost-effective, protein-based biomarker assay to predict treatment response in ER+ breast cancer, informed by my experience with quantitative protein measurements in tissue.
I am also involved in several other projects at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, including the evaluation of clonal selection in breast cancer triplets of pre-treatment biopsy, post-treatment, and metastatic tissue samples and the development of biomarker assays for sensitive situ detection of novel molecular alterations in genes such as ESR1, FGFR1, JAK2, and MCL-1, discovered through multi-omic profiling.
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- Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center
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MeSH terms are retrieved from PubMed records. Learn more.
Key: MeSH Term Keyword
ADP-Ribosylation Factors Animals Antibody Specificity Automation bcl-X Protein Binding Sites Breast Neoplasms Cell Cycle Cell Line Cell Line, Tumor Cricetulus DNA-Binding Proteins Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay Estrogen Antagonists Karyotyping Leukemia, Myeloid Lymphatic Vessels Microarray Analysis Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase 8 Models, Immunological Myeloid Cell Leukemia Sequence 1 Protein Neoadjuvant Therapy Positive Regulatory Domain I-Binding Factor 1 Pregnancy Prognosis Proto-Oncogene Proteins c-bcl-2 Receptor, ErbB-2 Survival Analysis Tumor Suppressor Proteins Xenograft Model Antitumor Assays