The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), an SABCS cosponsor, will honor two researchers for their significant contributions to breast cancer research during the 2024 SABCS.
2024 AACR Distinguished Lectureship in Breast Cancer Research
Steffi Oesterreich, PhD
Steffi Oesterreich, PhD, is the recipient of the 2024 AACR Distinguished Lectureship in Breast Cancer Research, supported by Aflac, Inc. This award was established to recognize outstanding science that has inspired, or has the potential to inspire, new perspectives on the etiology, diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of breast cancer.
Dr. Oesterreich is the Shear Family Foundation Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology at the University of Pittsburgh and coleader of the Cancer Biology Program at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. She also serves as the Co-Director of Education at the Women’s Cancer Research Center, a collaboration between UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and the Magee-Womens Research Institute. She is being recognized for her groundbreaking contributions in translational breast cancer research that have advanced the scientific understanding of invasive lobular carcinoma of the breast. Her work has led to an international paradigm shift within the research, clinical, and patient advocacy communities to recognize invasive lobular carcinoma as a distinct biological entity among breast cancers.
Dr. Oesterreich’s early research focused on understanding estrogen receptor (ER) alpha and antiestrogen therapies. She was part of the team that reported the first naturally occurring ER-activating mutation in breast cancer. After launching her own lab, Dr. Oesterreich was one of the first scientists to examine how ER not only activates but also represses gene expression. These novel findings expanded scientific understanding of the multifaceted roles of ER in regulating the breast cancer transcriptome and implicated ER-driven epigenetic reprogramming in resistance to endocrine therapy.
Furthermore, Dr. Oesterreich has found that invasive lobular carcinoma exhibits differing patterns of nuclear receptor activity, metastatic spread, metabolism, and immune modulation and has different drivers of disease compared with the more common invasive ductal carcinoma. She has championed the concept that invasive lobular carcinoma needs to be diagnosed and treated differently from invasive ductal carcinoma and that its successful treatment requires development of novel diagnostic methods and refinements of existing targeted therapies. To this end, Dr. Oesterreich and colleagues initiated the first clinical trial exclusively focused on patients with invasive lobular carcinoma.
2024 AACR Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research
Christina Curtis, PhD, MSc
Christina Curtis, PhD, MSc, is the recipient of the 2024 AACR Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research, supported by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. This award was established to honor an investigator whose novel and significant work has had or may have a far-reaching impact on the etiology, detection, diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of breast cancer. Such work may involve any discipline across the continuum of biomedical research, including basic, translational, clinical, and epidemiologic studies.
Dr. Curtis is the RZ Cao Professor of Medicine, Genetics, and Biomedical Data Science and Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cancer Genomics at Stanford University School of Medicine. She also serves as Director of Breast Cancer Translational Research and Co-Director of the Molecular Tumor Board at Stanford Cancer Institute. She is being recognized for her significant contributions to understanding the molecular determinants of breast cancer and for the development of multiple prognostic and predictive biomarkers.
The early work by Dr. Curtis included a landmark study describing a new integrated molecular classification of breast cancer based on both genome-wide copy number and gene-expression data from the METABRIC cohort of 2,000 women. These findings redefined the molecular landscape of breast cancer, revealing 11 subgroups of disease with distinct genomic drivers and clinical outcomes and resolving the heterogeneity among the expression-based intrinsic subgroups. This work demonstrated that multiple subgroups of breast cancer are driven by copy number aberrations, similar to HER2-positive disease.
Building on these important findings, Dr. Curtis reported on the 20-year clinical follow-up of a cohort of patients with breast cancer, including many from the METABRIC cohort. Through statistical modeling, she demonstrated that the subgroups she previously defined improved the prediction of late distant relapse, relative to established clinical predictors. Further, she identified four ER-positive, HER2-negative integrative subgroups associated with a persistent risk of distant recurrence within 20 years of diagnosis, which account for 25% of ER-positive disease. These findings spurred a biomarker-driven phase II clinical trial evaluating new targeted therapies in patients with early-stage ER-positive breast cancer who have a high risk of recurrence. Moreover, Dr. Curtis developed multiple predictive biomarkers to guide patient stratification. She has also made significant contributions to understanding breast cancer evolution by using computational modeling, providing quantitative evidence that breast and other cancers can spread to metastatic sites early in the disease course.
