Nicholas Mitsiades, MD
As part of the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot initiative, the National Cancer Institute has awarded $6.3 million to Nicholas Mitsiades, MD, of the Baylor College of Medicine, and a collaborative team at Baylor College of Medicine to establish a Minority Patient-Derived Xenograft Development and Trial Center. The Center will be dedicated to creating new tools that will help researchers to better understand the biologic causes behind racial and ethnic health disparities in prostate and breast cancers.
The newly formed center will bring together experts in patient-derived xenograft model generation, molecular biology and signaling pathways, animal drug treatment studies, as well as pathology and clinical management of prostate and breast cancers from Baylor and MD Anderson Cancer Center. The center will be directed by Dr. Mitsiades, who also serves as Associate Director of the Center for the Biology of Health Disparities and is Co-Leader of Nuclear Receptor Program in the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor.
“While socioeconomic and environmental factors definitely contribute to racial and ethnic cancer health disparities, there is also evidence for biologic differences” explained Dr. Mitsiades. “Baylor faculty serves a large minority patient population in the Houston area. Together, we will establish and fully characterize ethnically diverse cancer models that will allow us to extend our precision oncology initiatives to underserved minorities in the United States and address these health disparities.” ■
