Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation Grant Program

Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation Grant Program is sponsored by Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation. This program funds clinical and pre-clinical fellowships in high-impact breast cancer therapeutic research areas.

Research - TBBCF Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation How we will find the cure. Scientific Advisory Board Research Grant Recipients Congratulations to the TBBCF 2026 Grant Recipients After reviewing dozens of grant proposals, our TBBCF Scientific Advisory Board has awarded fellowships to the following top 2026 researchers.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Brigham & Women's Institute Columbia University Irving Medical Center Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Katharine Umphred-Wilson, MD The Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation Granting Process Download a PDF of The Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation (TBBCF) 2026 Granting Process Download (opens in new tab) The Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing critical funding to researchers investigating breast cancer cures and patient treatment options.

Terri Brodeur, the Foundation’s namesake, was diagnosed with Stage 4 Breast Cancer in June 2003. Effective treatment options did not exist to help Terri. After a two-year battle, marked by courage, grace, and dignity, at the young age of 41 years, Terri succumbed to the disease, leaving behind a beloved husband and three cherished children.

Our foundation is committed to the pledge of delivering 100 percent of gross fundraising dollars to breast cancer science and has held fast to this promise since its inception nearly 20 years ago. The Foundation’s Grant Program seeks to fund clinical and pre-clinical fellowships in high impact, breast cancer therapeutic research areas.

The foundation seeks to fund broadly the very best proposals across all relevant disciplines and as such focus areas can include basic, pre-clinical, clinical research and clinical care.

While there are no strict limits, fellowships are generally intended to support PhD, MD/PhD and MD physician scientists at earlier stages of their careers to enable them to establish/develop independent programs and compelling careers in breast cancer research and forward-looking patient care.

The award period is two years with a 1-year renewal to occur upon reporting successful progress towards year one research goals in a report sent to the Foundation. Stipends are $125,000 distributed over a 2-year period in $25,000 increments as funds are needed, with the intention that all funds are strictly used for direct support of the grantee or their research program.

The foundation maintains the highest standards and thus no minimum quota of grants is made in any one year. However, given the outstanding quality of candidates requesting support since the founding of the Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation, the board seeks to fund as many meritorious fellowships as is financially possible each year.

As such, it is our expectation that the grant administrators and mentors at each institution proactively carry out pre-screening of proposals or applicants to assure that proposals and applicants align with Foundation standards and philosophy. We ask that this occurs as an active process as it greatly enables the administration of the funds. We will provide additional guidance on this last point as may be needed.

Research Plan: Prospective applicants are expected to submit a research plan, pre-approved by their mentor or an organization-based board, to the foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board. The Foundation asks that the Institute specifically confirm review of the proposal in one or more of the documents described in the Supporting Materials .

The research plan must be fundamentally sound and will include statements of (a) scientific, technical and clinical merit of the research question placed specifically in the context of current state of relevant area knowledge; (b) specific design, methodology, and feasibility of the study; (c) relevance of the proposed research plan to the applicant’s career/intellectual objectives; (d) medical and health significance of the proposed research to breast cancer prevention, control and/or treatment; and (e) appropriateness of the research plan as a vehicle for developing necessary research skills of the applicant.

Where appropriate, the applicant is strongly encouraged to report preliminary findings that support the research proposal or concisely recount literature findings that do likewise. The research plan portion of the application contained in items (a) through (e) must not exceed 10 pages in length. This includes diagrams and figures but does not include supporting materials (see below) or scientific references.

Applications falling outside of these nominal guidelines will not be reviewed and the applicant will not be notified of the failure to comply. However, the review board reserves the option of asking applicants for additional supportive information, to contact mentors and references directly and to interview any candidate prior to award.

Supporting Materials: In addition, and not included in the 10-page limit, the applicant must present (a) evidence of the institutional commitment to the applicant; (b) a statement of the quality and relevance of their research, (c) the adequacy of the research facilities and training opportunities for the proposed project; (d) the appropriateness of the facilities and resources specifically available to the candidate, (e) a personal statement (f) biosketch/resume and (g) 2-3 letters of reference.

We ask applicants to take the submission of supporting materials as seriously as the formal proposal given their importance to assessing the overall proposal and applicant. Applications missing supporting materials or submitting inadequate materials will not be reviewed. The entire proposal must be submitted as one well-organized rolling PDF.

The Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation obtains its funds principally from private and corporate donations collected annually by our volunteers and through organized fund-raising events approved by the Foundation. Funding is recommended by the scientific advisory board and is administered by the sitting board of directors.

While awards are never made based on need, the committee asks that applicants disclose other sources of funding or any relevant funding or administrative conflicts in their personal statement letter. An application is mandatory for those applying for a 2025-2026 fellowship grant and must be submitted no later than November 21 st , 2025. Proposals should be sent electronically to: Dr. Nicholas A.

Saccomano, Ph. D. SAB Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation Applications will be reviewed promptly by the scientific advisory board.

The board will evaluate applications based on the following criteria: (a) the scientific merit, originality, and technical feasibility of the application; (b) the qualifications, experience and productivity of the applicant, and the members of the investigative team; (c) the facilities and resources available; and (d) the promise of the research or training as related to the control of breast cancer or to the benefit to be gained by persons with breast cancer.

At the discretion of the board, interviews will be requested of candidates. The evaluations of the board are provided to the Foundation’s Board of Directors. After considering the relative merit of the applications, the amount of available funds and the Foundation’s objectives, the board will determine which grants will be funded.

Applications that are not funded may be revised and resubmitted in a future granting cycle under the guidance of the scientific advisory board. Notifications of application receipt and review Approximately one month after receipt of the application, the applicant will receive an email confirming receipt of application and an approximate date upon which the board will communicate a decision back to the applicant.

Awards will be made and announced on or around the first week of February 2026. Publications and other research communications We require that publications and presentations resulting from research or training activities supported by this foundation, contain an acknowledgment that the effort was supported by the "Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation”.

We also require that a list of publications acknowledging TBBCF support is provided in a timely and thorough manner. This action is critical to our future fund-raising efforts and is required by our trustees and patrons. Failure to do so will be viewed negatively by trustees and donors.

Scientific Advisory Board Members Chair – Former Chief Scientific Officer, Senior VP, Pfizer Boulder Research and Development Co-Chair – Former President, Pfizer Global Research and Development Professor and Course Director, New York University Medical Center Associate Professor, New York University Medical Center President and Chief Scientific Officer Immunome TBBCF Research Grant Recipients Discover publications recognizing the support from the Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation by clicking here.

Learn More (opens in new tab) Explore the fascinating grant recipient abstracts from 2007 to 2023! Click here to discover the groundbreaking work of our researchers.

Learn More (opens in new tab) Dana-Farber Cancer Institute MIT - Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research Brigham & Women's Institute Columbia University Irving Medical Center Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Katharine Umphred-Wilson, MD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute MIT - Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research Benjamin Schrank, MD, PhD MD Anderson Cancer Center Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Stanford University - School of Med.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory University of Pennsylvania Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Massachusetts General Hospital Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Brigham & Women's Hospital - Harvard Medical School Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center Daniel L.

Abravanel, MD, PhD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute – Harvard Medical School Douglas Micalizzi MD, PhD Massachusetts General Hospital – Harvard Medical School Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Jennifer Rosenbluth, MD, PhD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute – Harvard Medical School Jennifer L. Guerriero, PhD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute – Harvard Medical School Sheheryar K.

Kabraji, BM BCh Dana-Farber Cancer Institute – Harvard Medical School Naiara Perurena, PhD, PharmD Brigham and Women’s Hospital – Harvard Medical School Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Massachusetts General Hospital Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center Adrienne Gropper Waks, MD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Mass General Hospital Cancer Center Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale New Haven Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Roswell Park Alliance Foundation Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Mount Sinai School of Medicine Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Stanford University - School of Med.

Description of work: Breast cancer is the second most common cancer diagnosed worldwide. In the United States alone, there are 260,000 new diagnoses and 40,000 deaths from breast cancer each year. The survival of patients is highly related to the cancer stage.

More recently, early-stage breast cancer has been treated with chemotherapy before surgery, which allows oncologists to assess the response of the cancer to chemotherapy. A good response to initial chemotherapy is associated with patients living longer and a higher chance of cure. In contrast, a poorer response is associated with cancer recurrence and shorter survival.

It is therefore important to accurately measure the presence or absence of residual cancer after initial chemotherapy, at the time of surgery--since this is when decisions are made to escalate treatment or to consider a patient cured. Current methods to measure residual cancer are imperfect.

The Residual Cancer Burden (RCB) index attempts to quantify the amount of residual cancer at surgery, but many patients identified as having low or no disease still have their cancer return, and many patients with high amounts of disease are cured. Detection of small amounts of circulating tumor DNA molecules, or “minimal residual disease” (MRD), can provide more accurate information than visual assessment by pathology.

In breast cancer, blood-based MRD is often incorrectly negative when the amount of cancer in the body is small, which is the case after initial chemotherapy for breast cancer. Improving cancer detection at this timepoint is critical since it can allow more effective treatment strategies including additional therapy for residual cancer, which can lead to more patients being cured.

While the number of tumor DNA molecules in the blood may be too low to detect after chemotherapy, more tumor is left behind in the breast tissue since this is the original site of disease. We propose a novel method to detect MRD in the breast cancer tissue itself with personalized disease monitoring.

We believe this approach will more sensitively detect residual cancer compared to pathological visual assessment at the time of surgery or even liquid biopsy MRD. This method will enable personalized and targeted treatments by identifying which patients have residual cancer after up-front chemotherapy.

It will reveal which specific mutations lead to resistance to initial chemotherapy and produce relapsed, incurable disease, and identify potential drug targets to improve outcomes. Biography: Julia D. Ransohoff, MD is a Postdoctoral Clinical Fellow in oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

As an undergraduate, she studied stem cell biology and researched stem cell transplant immunology and differentiation. As a medical student and Howard Hughes fellow at Stanford, her research focus shifted to cancer development, identifying RNA-protein interactions that govern epithelial biology.

With David Kurtz, MD, PhD, and Melinda Telli, MD, her current work focuses on methods to profile minimal residual disease in breast cancer both in the blood and in breast tissue after curative-intent chemotherapy using next-generation sequencing approaches. Her goal is to use these tools to predict patient outcomes and guide treatment decision-making.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute The optimization of systemic therapy for young women with early-stage hormone receptor-positive (HR+)/HER2-negative remains a significant challenge, particularly in terms of predicting chemotherapy responsiveness.

This is exemplified by recent gene expression profile-driven adjuvant therapy trials, in which premenopausal patients with low-to-intermediate genomic risk HR+ tumors derived a survival advantage from chemotherapy, but not their postmenopausal counterparts.

Critical questions have arisen as to whether this chemotherapy benefit stems from induction of ovarian function suppression, with consequent downregulation of estrogen receptor activity, or whether there are intrinsic differences in the biology of young women’s tumors, particularly tumor-immune microenvironment, that render them more susceptible to the cytotoxic effects of chemotherapy.

Systemic therapy strategies for young women with HR+ breast cancer could differ considerably on the basis of these alternative hypotheses, ranging from chemotherapy-sparing/hormonal-based approaches to escalated chemotherapy regimens incorporating agents such as immune checkpoint inhibitors.

The objective of this project is to determine the impact of chemotherapy on estrogen receptor activity and tumor-immune microenvironment in young women with HR+ breast cancer, by examining changes in the expression of pertinent genes in response to chemotherapy. In doing so, this project aims to elucidate key mechanisms by which chemotherapy exerts a differential benefit in young women with HR+ breast cancer.

Tumor specimens will be derived from a prospective multicenter cohort study of women diagnosed with breast cancer at age 40 years or younger, enabling correlation of chemotherapy-mediated estrogen receptor- and immune-related gene expression changes with patient characteristics, treatment response, and survival outcomes.

This will help to establish the clinical significance of these chemotherapeutic effects in young women with HR+ breast cancer, and accordingly, could provide a strong rationale for future tumor biology-guided clinical trials within this disparate population in need of more tailored systemic therapy options.

Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center Breast cancer presents as several clinical subtypes that have different progression trajectories and disparate prognoses.

However, there are two primary etiologic subtypes, each associated with a distinct set of risk factors and genetic profiles that essentially correspond to estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) and negative (ER-) disease, and the ER status serves as an important marker for treatment options and prognosis in breast cancer patients.

Compared with women diagnosed with ER+ breast cancer, those with ER- tumors generally have a poorer prognosis, partly because of their aggressive phenotype and the lack of targeted therapy. In addition, high-grade ER- breast cancer is more common among American women of African ancestry (AA) than among those of European ancestry (EA).

Presently, the underlying causes of this increased risk of ER breast cancer in AA women are not clear, but the causes are likely multifaceted. In the last few decades, substantial research has been devoted to identifying epigenetic and transcriptomic alterations that drive tumorigenesis.

These efforts have led to an improved understanding of its mechanisms and advanced methods for targeted therapeutic strategies for cancer and its complications. However, evidence linking RNA modifications to the development, maintenance, and progression of breast cancer is still lacking.

By using my expertise in molecular and cellular biology and by taking advantage of novel, state-of-the-art high-throughput techniques in m6A Selective Allyl Chemical labeling and sequencing (m6A-SAC-seq) and CRISPR/Cas technology, I want to elucidate the mechanisms of action of epi transcriptomic differences in tumor progression between ER- and ER+ breast cancers and link those differences to clinical outcome disparities between women of difference races.

Through this work, we have identified more than 150 candidate mRNAs that show significant differences in m6A methylation between ER subtypes and races. I now propose to test a select group of these modifications for their effects on breast cancer progression by manipulating the fraction of m6A methylation in breast cancer cell lines using CRISPR/Cas technology.

I will also identify the functional roles of m6A RNA modifications in breast cancer cells.

As an active member of the methylation research group at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, and as a Research Associate participating in National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 funded studies on DNA methylation profiling of breast tumors from AA and EA women as well as a currently funded R01 to study long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) in the same patient cohorts, I have developed a strong passion for research in the field of epigenetic regulation of cancer.

I will strive to become an independent investigator who conducts top-notch epigenetic research that will ultimately influence patient care. My overall long-term goal as an independent investigator is to decipher the cellular and molecular phenomena that occur in breast cancer to understand breast cancer better and potentially facilitate the development of novel molecular targets for treatment and cancer prevention.

Dr. Sribenja completed her undergraduate Jennifer L. Guerriero, PhD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute – Harvard Medical School Modulating the immune system as an anti-cancer strategy has shown great promise in some types of cancer, however there has been limited responses in breast cancer.

While the main focus of immunotherapy has been on the adaptive immune system, namely T cells, harnessing innate immune cells such as tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) offers a novel strategy to induce breast tumor regression. Breast tumors are highly infiltrated with suppressive TAMs and clinically, a high number of TAMs in breast tumors correlate with a worse overall prognosis and increased metastasis.

Therefore, the proposed research focuses on understanding how TAMs contribute to the suppressive tumor microenvironment. A major goal of the project funded through the Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation is to reveal novel signaling pathways in TAMs that can be targeted therapeutically. The unique and novel clinical focus of harnessing macrophages has the potential to have a considerable impact in the treatment of breast cancer.

Dr. Guerriero received her bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from Northeastern University and has a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Immunology and Pathology from Stony Brook University where she trained under Dr. Wei-Xing Zong and completed her thesis entitled, “A study of cell death pathways and innate immunity in cancer chemotherapy”.

Dr. Guerriero completed her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Anthony Letai at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where she investigated the role of tumor macrophages in breast cancer and identified novel mechanisms to target pro-tumor macrophages to an anti-tumor phenotype to induce tumor regression.

Dr. Guerriero is now an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is the Director of the Breast Tumor Immunology Laboratory at Dana-Farber Cancer-Institute. Her main focus is to bridge basic and translational breast cancer research and immunology with clinical science.

She focuses on translating basic knowledge of how macrophages in the breast tumor microenvironment induce apoptosis of cancer cells, as well as identify how macrophages regulate their phenotype at a molecular level. A major goal is to harnessing the anti-tumor potential of tumor-associated macrophages for anti-cancer therapy in breast cancer.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Despite recent advances in treatment options, breast cancer remains the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women. Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a subgroup of breast cancer that is characterized by the absence of the estrogen receptor, the progesterone receptor and HER2-amplification.

Because of the lack of these markers, there are at present -unlike for other subgroups of breast cancer- no targeted therapies available for TNBC. Therefore, TNBC is currently treated with conventional chemotherapy in addition to radiotherapy and surgery. Despite the often-good initial response to chemotherapy, therapy resistance is frequent in TNBC, making it one of the most severe subtypes of breast cancer.

To improve the perspectives of TNBC patients, there is need for better and more targeted treatments. To address this need, Dr. Daniels aims to identify metabolic pathways that can be targeted in combination with conventional chemotherapy to increase the sensitivity of TNBC to these agents. Dr. Daniels focusses on metabolism, because the metabolic requirements of cancer cells are different than those of normal cells.

Therefore, by targeting metabolism cancer cells can be weakened specifically, without affecting normal cells. To determine which metabolic features to target in cancer cells, Dr. Daniels is using a technique called “BH3-profiling”. BH3-profiling was developed by the Letai laboratory to measure the proximity of the cells to dying.

This novel approach allows for the identification of metabolic perturbations that push the cancer cells closer to the point of dying, even if these perturbations do not cause cell death on their own. Using a drug to induce metabolic instability in cancer cells will make them more sensitive to chemotherapy, leading to a more effective eradiation of the cancer.

The data generated in this project will lead to the development of better treatment regiments with a higher therapy efficacy and better clinical response. Additionally, information generated in this project can lead to the development of a targeted therapy for triple negative breast cancer. Dr. Veerle Daniels did her undergraduate studies at the department of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the KULeuven University in Belgium.

In 2009, she transitioned to the department of Oncology of the KULeuven to do her Ph. D. training under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Johan Swinnen.

During her Ph. D. she investigated the role of lipid metabolism in tumor development and cancer cell resistance towards chemotherapy.

In 2015 she moved to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to start her post-doctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Anthony Letai, M. D. PhD.

Adrienne Gropper Waks, MD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Following many important advances in treating HER2-positive breast cancer over the past two decades, a large majority of patients with non-metastatic HER2-positive tumors are cured with today’s treatments. For this majority of patients who do well in the long-term, we must begin to identify ways to cure HER2-positive breast cancer with less toxic treatments.

Modern treatment regimens for stage II and III non-metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer consist of multiple chemotherapy agents plus HER2-directed therapy with trastuzumab (Herceptin, H) and sometimes pertuzumab (Perjeta, P). Scaling back the number of chemotherapy agents used may allow patients to maintain better quality of life while on treatment, as well as decrease the chance of rare but serious chemotherapy complications.

As a Terri Brodeur fellow, Dr. Waks plans to conduct a clinical trial investigating a new treatment approach in stage II and III HER2-positive breast cancer, with the goal of allowing select patients to receive less chemotherapy.

We know that in patients who receive breast cancer treatment before breast surgery, those who have all cancer eradicated from the breast and lymph nodes at the time of surgery (“pathologic complete response”) have an excellent prognosis.

In our clinical trial, patients will be treated before surgery with paclitaxel, trastuzumab, and pertuzumab (“THP”), and those who achieve pathologic complete response at surgery—and have an excellent prognosis on that basis—will go on to receive further HP post-surgery, without any additional chemotherapy. Our primary goal in the trial is to assess the acceptability of this treatment approach to patients and their doctors.

We hope that this trial, which is a precursor to a large international trial investigating the same approach, will be a step toward establishing HER2-positive breast cancer treatments that are highly effective for a select patient group, and also maximize patient quality of life. Dr. Waks conducted her undergraduate studies at Princeton University and then obtained her M. D.

degree at Harvard Medical School. She completed residency training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, where she was selected to serve for an additional year as a Chief Resident in internal medicine.

She is currently a clinical and research fellow in medical oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she will shortly join the staff as an attending physician in breast oncology at the Dana-Farber Susan F. Smith Center for Women’s Cancers, and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Individuals with inherited mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 face an estimated 70% lifetime risk of breast cancer.

While BRCA1 and BRCA2 have well-established roles in DNA damage repair, the ways in which these alterations promote tumor formation remain poorly understood. This knowledge gap has limited efforts towards the detection, prevention, and interception of cancer in individuals harboring high-risk genetic variants.

The overarching goal of Dr. Bao’s research project is to define the molecular changes in BRCA1/2 carriers that drive accelerated tumor formation. To test this, he is working with a cooperative group that has assembled a comprehensive single-cell atlas of breast tissue from individuals harboring inherited mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 as well as non-carrier individuals.

Leveraging hundreds of thousands of cells profiled in this dataset, Dr. Bao will perform integrative genomics analyses to identify changes in gene expression and DNA accessibility priming BRCA1/2-mutant breast epithelial cells for tumor initiation. In parallel, he will also investigate the role of DNA copy number alterations within epithelial cells as a key driver of tumor formation within BRCA1/2 carriers.

Collectively, these findings will advance our understanding of the earliest molecular alterations in precursor breast cancer cells, a key step towards enabling future strategies to target and eliminate these cells prior to malignant Transformation. Dr. Bao received his undergraduate degree from Duke University and his medical degree from the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.

He completed his internal medicine residency at the University of California San Francisco in 2024. He is currently a senior medical oncology fellow in the Breast Oncology Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Working in the laboratories of Drs.

Joan Brugge and Eliezer Van Allen, Dr. Bao’s research leverages computational genomics to better understand the molecular evolution of breast cancer and ultimately how these processes can be translated into new ways to prevent and treat the disease. Katharine Umphred-Wilson, MD Metastasis, the spread of cancer to distant organs, is the leading cause of death for patients with breast cancer.

Patients with metastatic triple ‑ negative breast cancer (TNBC) face poorer outcomes because effective targeted treatments are lacking. Advances in immunotherapy, namely immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), can extend survival of patients with metastatic TNBC; however, most patients do not respond to treatment. Thus, there is a pressing need to uncover improved strategies to increase the number of responsive patients.

ICIs work with the immune system to activate cytotoxic (or “killer”) immune cells to better attack cancer. Research has shown that suppressive signals from tumors block the activity of these killer immune cells, thus reducing how well immunotherapy treatments, like ICIs, work. Intriguingly, the liver is a common metastatic site for various cancers, including TNBC, yet it remains understudied compared to the lung.

Currently, no therapies specifically target TNBC liver metastases. This project proposes to repurpose Ribavirin – an FDA ‑ approved antiviral drug for hepatitis C – to enhance immunotherapy of TNBC liver metastases. Prior research shows that Ribavirin reduces immunosuppressive signals in the liver and boosts immune activity during hepatitis.

However, its effects on the immune system in cancer, and its potential to enhance ICI therapy in TNBC liver metastases, have not been explored. By studying how Ribavirin alters liver immune cells and its impact on ICIs, this project could lead to improved treatments for TNBC patients and others with liver metastases. It will also provide new insights into how immune cells function within metastatic tumors.

Dr. Katharine Umphred-Wilson earned her BS degree in Molecular Biology from the Rochester Institute of Technology and her PhD degree in Pathology from Case Western Reserve University under the mentorship of Dr. Stanley Adoro, where she investigated how genetic structures termed “super-enhancers” can be targeted to prevent the development of T-cell leukemia.

She is now a postdoctoral fellow at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in the laboratory of Dr. Scott Abrams, developing new therapeutic strategies that dampen myeloid-driven immune suppression to improve immunotherapy outcomes in metastatic TNBC.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Short Abstract/Biography: Antibody-drug conjugates are a relatively new therapeutic modality utilized to treat breast cancer, which allows for a selective delivery of chemotherapy to tumor cells. Antibody-drug conjugates are composed of three parts: 1. an antibody that reaches and binds a specific protein on the cancer cell surface, 2.

a molecular linker that acts as a bridge between the antibody and the payload, and 3. a toxic payload that, once delivered, kills the tumor cells. Despite being selective and highly active, antibody-drug conjugates can still harbor relevant side effects, calling for precision in their use in clinical practice.

To improve the precision in the use of antibody-drug conjugates, we decided to leverage data and banked samples collected from patients with breast cancer that have received antibodydrug conjugates at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, using them to uncover and validate biomarkers predicting the activity of ADCs.

We will utilize cutting edge technologies to quantitate protein expression, dissect biological states and unveil genetic aberrations from breast cancer cells.

These molecular features will be linked to the real-world activity of antibody-drug conjugates in clinical practice, aiming to understand which patients benefit the most from which specific antibody-drug conjugates, as well as elucidate mechanisms of resistance to these important anticancer drugs.

The ultimate goal of the project is to be able to tailor the use of antibody-drug conjugates to the profile of each patient and tumor, in order to maximize