Harvard Medical School Boston, Massachusetts
Senior Research Scientist, Informatics Program Boston Children’s Hospital Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Targeting deficiencies in DNA repair that can be exploited to treat aggressive breast cancers.
The goal of targeted therapy is to kill cancer cells without harming healthy cells and thereby reduce the risk that the patient will experience side effects from their cancer treatment. Tumor cells that have defects in DNA repair, and are thus unable to fix DNA damage, are good targets for drugs that cause DNA damage. Triple-negative and BRCA-driven breast cancers typically harbor specific DNA repair defects that are targets for a class of drugs called PARP inhibitors and DNA-damaging platinum-based drugs. Dr. Szallasi aims to find new strategies to expand the use of PARP inhibitors and other DNA-damaging drugs to benefit more patients.
Dr. Szallasi has continued to develop and validate diagnostic tools to identify DNA repair deficiencies in tumors that may lead to better treatment options. He and his team have discovered specific gene mutation signatures that may be able to identify breast cancers that harbor a defect in a type of DNA repair called nucleotide excision repair (NER). He and his team found that this type of DNA repair deficiency makes tumors particularly sensitive to cisplatin chemotherapy, making this gene signature a potential marker for patients most likely to respond to this therapy. His team also found that BRCA2-mutant breast cancer is NER deficient and that the combination of PARP inhibitors and irofulven, a drug in a novel class of anti-tumor agents that inhibit DNA replication, shows a high level of therapeutic synergy.
Dr. Szallasi will use a genomics/bioinformatics tool to extract DNA repair deficiency-associated genomic signatures and investigate changes in DNA repair status in metastatic breast cancer.
Dr. Szallasi received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Medicine in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1988. He did postdoctoral research in molecular pharmacology of cancer at the National Cancer Institute. As a faculty member, first at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences and currently at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he has become active in the high throughput analysis of breast cancer. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, mainly on the molecular pharmacology and high throughput analysis of cancer.
Dr. Szallasi’s group is interested in the application of high throughput measurements for cancer research. They implemented several methods that increased the reliability of microarray and next generation sequencing measurements. They are also interested in approaches that combine genomic scale measurements in a manner that describe essential cancer biology in a robust fashion. Dr. Szallasi is currently developing methods that determine and quantify specific DNA repair pathway aberrations in human tumor biopsies. This work led to a DNA aberration profile-based method that predicts response to platinum-based therapy with high accuracy, and which is currently in the final stages of comprehensive clinical validation.
2008
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