Professor
CurrentMy lab’s work centers around the hypothesis that age-related changes to the breast microenvironment (i) makes the epithelia more susceptible to malignant transformation and (ii) modulates the efficacy of pathway-targeted anti-cancer therapeutics. A cornerstone of our approach has been to develop and utilize a primary human mammary epithelial cell culture platform, which we have shown at early passage preserves many of the molecular and biochemical characteristics of aging epithelia from in vivo. To understand the functional consequences of age-dependent molecular and biochemical changes in stem cells and other lineages we have developed multiple bioengineered cell culture platforms that enable us to quantify patterns of functional responses in defined microenvironmental milieus. Using these resources we have described the tissue-level changes that arise during the aging process that make older women more susceptible to breast cancer, and using the cell based functional assays we are learning about the mechanisms driving these tissue-level phenotypes of age. Ultimately we are a prevention-focused research program and we are working towards a comprehensive understanding of the tissue-level changes that presage breast cancer susceptibility, and then identifying ways to avoid deleterious functional states of aging.
