Menu Close

Congrats to Neil and the lab on their recent paper studying treatment regimens for elderly breast cancer – out now in JAMA Network Open!

LeeOesterreich 0 Comments

Update (7/16/2021): Check out the 21 news stories written on our recent publication!
https://jamanetwork.altmetric.com/details/103966504/news

Led by Neil Carleton with significant contributions from others in the lab (Osama Shah & Fangyuan (Chelsea) Chen), we studied trends of use of two interventions, sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) and radiation therapy (RT), in elderly women with ER+, clinically node-negative breast cancer. Despite two national guidelines recommending against their use, trends of use by surgical oncologists and radiation oncologists remain quite high. We used propensity score matching to control for confounding and biases in retrospective analysis. Significantly, we found that omitting either SLNB or RT was a feasible approach to care and did not compromise recurrence free survival. Our results bolster the existing clinical guidelines recommending for de-implementation of these interventions.

This was a highly collaborative projects with input from authors in biostatistics, radiation oncology, surgical oncology, medical oncology, and specialists in women’s cancer.

Excitingly, this paper received quite a bit of attention in the media and in the field at large! We were thrilled to see Dr. Lee appear on multiple local TV news stations and Dr. McAuliffe making a number of radio appearances!

Link to paper on journal website: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2778563

Link to Hillman Cancer Center Press Release press release: https://hillmanresearch.upmc.edu/breast-cancer-treatment-study/

Link to Adrian’s KDKA segment: https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/video/5495249-upmc-study-not-all-breast-cancer-should-be-treated/

Link to Adrian’s WTAE segment: https://www.wtae.com/article/sometimes-less-is-better-study-looks-at-treatment-of-breast-cancer-patients-over-70/36159559

Ashuvinee Elangovan wins the GRC and BGSA travel awards!

LeeOesterreich 0 Comments

Congrats to Ashuvinee Elangovan for winning the GRC and BGSA travel awards!

Ashuvinee Elangovan
Graduate Student

Ashuvinee Elangovan, a 2nd year graduate student in the lab won travel awards from the Gordon Research (GRC) Conferences and the Biomedical Graduate Student Association (BGSA) for the upcoming Gordon conference on IGF and Insulin System in Physiology and Disease in Ventura, CA.

Congrats to Dr. Tasdemir and colleagues on their new BioRxiv pre-print!

LeeOesterreich 0 Comments

Congratulations to Nilgun Tasdemir on her new publication!

Proteomic and Transcriptomic Profiling Identifies Mediators of Anchorage-Independent Growth and Roles of Inhibitor of Differentiation Proteins in Invasive Lobular Breast Cancer – biorxiv.org

Abstract. BACKGROUND: Invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) is a histological subtype of breast cancer with distinct molecular and clinical features from the more common subtype invasive lobular carcinoma (IDC).www.biorxiv.org

New Publication! “Loss of E-cadherin Enhances IGF1–IGF1R Pathway Activation and Sensitizes Breast Cancers to Anti-IGF1R/InsR Inhibitors”

LeeOesterreich 0 Comments

Loss of E-cadherin Enhances IGF1–IGF1R Pathway Activation and Sensitizes Breast Cancers to Anti-IGF1R/InsR Inhibitors

We provide evidence that loss of E-cadherin hyperactivates the IGF1R pathway and increases sensitivity to IGF1R/InsR targeted therapy, thus identifying the IGF1R pathway as a potential novel target in E-cadherin–deficient breast cancers such as invasive lobular cancer.

New publication! “Key regulators of lipid metabolism drive endocrine resistance in invasive lobular breast cancer”

LeeOesterreich 0 Comments

Our latest paper focused on lobular breast cancer is now available. Role for SREBP1 and other regulators of fatty acid and cholesterol synthesis in invasive lobular breast cancer.

New publication! “Circulating Tumor Cell Phenotyping via High-Throughput Acoustic Separation.”

LeeOesterreich 0 Comments
 2018 Aug;14(32):e1801131. doi: 10.1002/smll.201801131. Epub 2018 Jul 3.

Circulating Tumor Cell Phenotyping via High-Throughput Acoustic Separation.

Wu M1, Huang PH1, Zhang R2, Mao Z2, Chen C1, Kemeny G3, Li P4, Lee AV5, Gyanchandani R5, Armstrong AJ3, Dao M6, Suresh S7, Huang TJ1.

Abstract

The study of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) offers pathways to develop new diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers that benefit cancer treatments. In order to fully exploit and interpret the information provided by CTCs, the development of a platform is reported that integrates acoustics and microfluidics to isolate rare CTCs from peripheral blood in high throughput while preserving their structural, biological, and functional integrity. Cancer cells are first isolated from leukocytes with a throughput of 7.5 mL h-1 , achieving a recovery rate of at least 86% while maintaining the cells’ ability to proliferate. High-throughput acoustic separation enables statistical analysis of isolated CTCs from prostate cancer patients to be performed to determine their size distribution and phenotypic heterogeneity for a range of biomarkers, including the visualization of CTCs with a loss of expression for the prostate specific membrane antigen. The method also enables the isolation of even rarer, but clinically important, CTC clusters.