Congratulations to Dr. Steffi Oesterreich for being awarded the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring!! Well deserved! https://www.pittwire.pitt.edu/accolades-honors/2026/03/04/provosts-award-doctoral-mentoring
Match Day has arrived! Neil Carleton will be headed up to Brigham and Women’s/Harvard for Internal Medicine, Kanako Mori matched at UPMC Internal Medicine, and Fangyuan (Chelsea) Chen matched to Jacobi Medical Center in NYC.
Drs. Steffi Oesterreich and Adrian Lee discussing reviewers’ comments from ‘Tamoxifen-bound estrogen receptor (ER) strongly interacts with the nuclear matrix protein HET/SAF-B, a novel inhibitor of ER-mediated transactivation. Oesterreich S, Zhang Q, Hopp T, Fuqua SA, Michaelis M, Zhao HH, Davie JR, Osborne CK, Lee AV. Mol Endocrinol. 2000 Mar;14(3):369-81. doi: 10.1210/mend.14.3.0432.PMID: 10707955.
This is taken in 1999 in our lab when we first started in Dr. Oesterreich’s office as Junior Faculty – in the middle of a lab.
Congratulations to Dr Neil Carleton for being awarded this year’s Hamilton Translational Science award from the MSTP program. (Curiously, Dr Nolan Priedigkeit MD PhD, another prior trainee from the Lee-Oesterreich lab, was the first awardee a few years back)”
The Susan G. Komen More Than Pink Walk in Pittsburgh was a great success! A sunny day with thousands of attendees. Thanks to all of the organizers and sponsors. Our team – the Magee-Hillman Breast Cancer Warriors was one of the top fundraisers. We were happy to see Natera sponsoring the event; Their booth was always busy! We spent most of the time at the Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC booth which was never quiet.
The Institute for Precision Medicine hosted the NCI-BCRF-Komen workshop on “Patient-Derived Breast Cancer Organoids: Challenges & Opportunities” on May 21-22, 2025 at The Assembly in Pittsburgh, PA.
The meeting was co-organized by myself, Sandra Demaria, Ariella Hanker, and Senthil Muthuswamy.
We brought together 45 investigators to discuss the state-of-the-art in PDO research and gaps that present barriers to progress.
The lively event raised several excellent points about how PDOs are credentialed and used in research. In particular, their use in predicting patient response to therapy (e.g., co-clinical trials) was a hotly discussed topic.
The National Institutes of Health recently promoted organoid models to reduce the reliance on animal models, and we hope that these novel alternative metholodologies will provide new avenues for precision medicine.
We thank The Breast Cancer Research Foundation and Susan G. Komen for sponsoring the workshop and advocates Bob Riter and Jamie LaScala who participated in a panel discussion on obtaining tissue for research.
Outcomes and deliverables of the workshop will be a white paper on best practices in breast cancer PDO research and hopefully a new network that can share PDO and data and accelerate this research.
If you are interested in participating in the Breast Organoid Working Group (BOWG) contact Dr. Adrian Lee.
