Charlotte Kuperwasser, PhD

With the continued support of BCRF, Dr. Kuperwasser and team have been expanding their research towards understanding the biology of breast cancer stem cells. In addition, they have also begun collaborations with the Perou, Schnitt and Weinberg laboratories (also supported by BCRF), to complement their own work to further understanding of how cancer stem cells behave. This past year, they have identified genes that regulate cancer stem cells, they have begun to determine the relationship between normal stem cells and cancer stem cells, and they have performed pre-clinical testing of newly identified drugs that target cancer stem cells. This work has resulted in 4 manuscripts, 2 of which are in press and 2 that are currently under review.

Mid-Year Progress Report:
With BCRF support, Dr. Kuperwasser and team have been continuing their efforts towards understanding the biology of normal and cancer stem cells. In addition, they have also been working towards understanding the effect of gene mutation on perturbing stem cell biology. They recently published a manuscript in Cancer Cell where they identified the cell of origin for the most common form of breast cancer (luminal-like cancer) and have found that the cyclin D1 gene is necessary for self-renewal of breast stem cells. This work has begun to reveal the important relationship between normal breast stem cells and cancer stem cells. They have also submitted another manuscript describing a novel mechanism that regulates breast stem cell biology in women harboring mutations in BRCA1. These findings are significant because they establish for the first time an important principle: the pre-existing genetic background of patients affects the behavior of the tumors that arise after malignant conversion.

Bio:
Dr. Charlotte Kuperwasser is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Cellular Biology at Tufts University School of Medicine and an investigator at the Molecular Oncology Research Institute (MORI) at Tufts Medical Center. She has been working in breast cancer research since her graduate training at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she completed her PhD in 2000.

As a Jane Coffin Child's Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Robert Weinberg, she developed a novel humanized model to successfully recreate normal and neoplastic human breast tissues in laboratory models. In addition, she also developed another novel humanized model of human breast cancer metastasis to human bone.

Dr. Kuperwasser is a nationally recognized expert in breast cancer research, xenograft laboratory models, and the tissue microenviroment. Dr. Kuperwasser has received several awards including the COG/Aventis Young Investigator Award, the Raymond & Beverly Sackler Award, and the Natalie V. Zucker Award