MBCN’s Metastatic Breast Cancer Research Leadership Award 2015 recipients included Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Andrew Ewald and Baylor’s Dr. Matthew Ellis

Improving Knowledge About Metastasis

Dr. Andrew Ewald, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Cell Biology and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Dr. Andrew Ewald is an interdisciplinary cell and cancer biologist. His laboratory, made up of basic science and medical trainees working in collaboration with engineers and clinicians, pioneered the development and use of 3D culture techniques to capture and analyze in real-time the growth and invasion of breast cancer tumor cells. This work is providing deeper insights into the biology of metastasis.

How and why does breast cancer metastasize? Today, we don’t have those answers. But Dr. Ewald believes research that seeks to understand and describe how cancer cells learn to make connections to other nearby cells, travel through local tissues and the blood stream, and then establish themselves as a new tumor in the bone, lung, liver or brain will lead to new strategies and treatments to control or eliminate cancer cells from accomplishing these steps to metastatic spread and ultimately improve outcomes for individuals with metastatic breast cancer. Dr. Ewald’s work is complex, and yet he is able to explain his work in a way that patients can understand, as this video demonstrates.

Improving Treatments For Metastatic Patients

Director of the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center at Baylor College of Medicine

Dr. Matthew Ellis is both an oncologist and scientist who has championed the cause of metastatic breast cancer patients for well over a decade. Currently, Dr. Ellis is the director of the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center at Baylor College of Medicine. He was recruited from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis where from 2010 to 2014 he was a professor of medicine and head of the section of breast oncology. He had also served as a faculty member there since 2003.While at Washington University Dr. Ellis gathered a large resource of patient derived xenografts (tumors taken directly from the patient and studied in animals) and these became excellent resources for testing new therapies and understanding treatment resistance.His work to develop these models focused on estrogen receptor positive breast cancer and these patient derived xenografts will now complement similar efforts underway by Baylor Smith Breast Center researchers with estrogen receptor negative breast cancer.

Dr. Ellis, a pioneer in breast cancer genomics, has been instrumental in developing a Genome Atlas and Therapeutic Road Map for estrogen receptor positive breast cancer. Most recently he has found that metastatic breast tumors initially positive for the estrogen receptor frequently harbor mutations and translocations in the receptor that render the tumor resistant to endocrine therapies used to block estrogen. Several laboratories are now trying to develop new drugs that will block these mutant receptors.