Professor Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD will give a lecture titled Breast cancer prevention via targeting progenitors in our distinguished lecture series in Fróði auditorium April 17th at 11:00-12:00.
GPMLS will also invite students/post docs to lunch with Dr. Polyak after her presentation, so if you are interested please sign up here.
Abstract: "Our goal is to identify differences between normal and cancerous breast tissue, determine their consequences, and use this information to improve the clinical management of breast cancer patients. The three main areas of our interests are: (1) how to accurately predict breast cancer risk and prevent breast cancer initiation or progression from in situ to invasive disease, (2) better understand drivers of tumor evolution with emphasis on metastatic progression and therapeutic resistance, and (3) novel therapeutic targets in breast cancer with particular focus on cancers such as triple-negative breast cancer and inflammatory breast cancer. All of our studies start with analyzing samples from breast cancer patients (or normal healthy women for the risk studies(, formulate hypotheses based on our observations, use experimental models to test these, and then translate back our findings into clinical care."
Kornelia Polyak, is a Professor of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School and is an internationally recognized leader of the breast cancer research field. Dr. Polyak’s laboratory is dedicated to the molecular analysis of human breast cancer with the goal improving the clinical management of breast cancer patients. Her lab has devoted much effort to develop new ways to study tumors as a whole and to apply interdisciplinary approaches. Using these methods Dr. Polyak’s lab has been at the forefront of studies analyzing purified cell populations from normal and neoplastic human breast tissue at genomic scale and in situ at single cell level and to apply mathematical and ecological models for the better understanding of breast tumor evolution. She has also been successful with the clinical translation of her findings including the testing of efficacy of JAK2 and BET bromodomain inhibitors for the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer in clinical trials. Dr. Polyak have received numerous awards including the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research in 2011, the 2012 AACR Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research, and the Rosalind Franklin Award in 2016. She is also a 2015 recipient of the NCI Outstanding Investigator award.
