# New therapeutic vulnerabilities in breast cancer

> **NIH NIH P01** · DANA-FARBER CANCER INST · 2022 · $1,718,646

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
This Proposal describes the existing and proposed future activities of a consortium of three research groups in
the Boston, MA area whose research has been focused over the past two decades on the pathogenesis of
human breast cancer. All three current Project Leaders and the Pathology Core have worked together in a prior
P01 led by Dr. Robert Weinberg (Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA) for 21 years.
As such, the proposed Team has a long history of productive collaborative projects and well-established
mechanisms in place to facilitate interactions. The primary focus of the three research groups is to improve our
understanding of mechanisms of resistance to currently used therapies and to identify and characterize new
therapeutic targets and combination therapies with the goal of clinical translation of the Program's preclinical
findings; indeed, some of our findings have already inspired the design of FDA-approved therapeutics with
several clinical trials in progress. The interactions between the Leaders and trainees of the component Groups
is driven by convening monthly research meetings throughout the academic year and a single research retreat
in Western Massachusetts, during which trainees in the participating laboratories meet and present the details
of their respective research findings. The productivity of this consortium depends on the complementary research
interests and experimental approaches of the component Groups. The participating Groups address therapeutic
resistance and novel vulnerabilities in breast cancer from various perspectives, beginning with the defining
molecular mechanisms underlying heterogeneity in cellular responses to growth regulatory signals and
dissecting epigenetic and transcriptomic heterogeneity in therapeutic resistance and in driving the outgrowth of
distant metastases. The respective research emphases of the participating Project Groups are highly
complementary and integrated. This complementarity is manifested through repeated cross-fertilization at the
conceptual level, the sharing of reagents generated by one Project with others, complementary technologies,
and successful joint publications.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10434102
- **Project number:** 5P01CA250959-03
- **Recipient organization:** DANA-FARBER CANCER INST
- **Principal Investigator:** KORNELIA POLYAK
- **Activity code:** P01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $1,718,646
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-09-11 → 2025-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10434102

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10434102, New therapeutic vulnerabilities in breast cancer (5P01CA250959-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10434102. Licensed CC0.

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