Steffi Oesterreich
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Invasive lobular breast cancer (ILC) is the second most common type of breast cancer and affects up to 40,000 patients in the US each year. Yet clinical trials and guidelines usually treat it as the same disease as the more common invasive ductal breast cancer.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Genetics
Biology
- Topics
invasive lobular breast cancer
E-cadherin
organoids
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Compare ILC cell lines, patient-derived organoids, xenografts, homografts and genetically engineered mice with human ILC tumors using histopathology plus genomic, epigenomic and transcriptomic profiling.
- Test which models reproduce ILC's single-file growth pattern in the dish and its metastasis in animals, comparing metastasis models with sequenced human ILC metastases from the ovary and gastrointestinal tract.
- Run CRISPR gene-knockout and drug screens on ILC cell lines and organoids with the Broad Institute, releasing the results through the DepMap portal for other researchers.
- Measure endocrine therapy response in rodent homograft models and compare it with an ongoing ILC clinical trial, and characterize immune cell infiltration and checkpoint inhibitor response in these models.
More about the research
ILC cells have almost always lost E-cadherin (CDH1), a protein that holds cells together. As a result, tumor cells spread through tissue in single-file lines. Patients often relapse late and develop metastases in unusual places such as the ovary and the lining of the abdomen. One reason ILC is understudied is that no one knows which laboratory models faithfully mimic the human disease.
Why it matters
Patients with ILC are mostly treated under guidelines built for ductal breast cancer, even though ILC differs in biology, recurrence and metastasis. A curated, publicly shared set of models shown to mirror human ILC could help researchers test targeted, hormone and immune therapies for primary and metastatic ILC more reliably. In the long run, this could help identify treatments suited to this common but underserved breast cancer subtype.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Luis Parada
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether NF1-mutant glioblastomas have distinct tumor cell properties and immune microenvironments, using engineered mice lacking NF1, Tp53 and Pten compared with NF1-normal QKi/Tp53/Pten mice.
Jonathan Coloff
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Biochemistry
Determine whether luminal breast tumors, which cannot make the amino acid serine, shrink or stop growing when mice are fed a serine-free diet.
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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