Eduardo Francisco Farias, Ph.D.
Institutional Affiliation:
Associate Professor
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
http://www.mountsinai.org/Find%20A%20Faculty/profile.do?id=0000072500001497310032&officeDrawer=biz
Education
School of Medicine, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ph.D.
Research
Role of Retinoic Acid Receptors in Mammary Biology and Breast Cancer
Impact
A better understanding of the function of the RARs during normal mammary development is an important step to develop rational approaches to modulate their function in pathological situations like breast cancer to prevent or delay tumor development and growth.
Summary of Research
Our work is centered on the use of cancer-prone mice as a model of human breast cancer. This approach, as any other, has advantages and disadvantages. An obvious disadvantage is that mice are not people. Two significant advantages are that we can precisely alter the mouse genome at the single gene level and ask what happens in living animals rather than human cells artificially maintained in the laboratory. There are two questions we want to answer: 1) how do vitamin A metabolites influence human cancer at the molecular level? and 2) how can we take advantage of the information we gather to improve human breast cancer therapy? What we have learned is that vitamin A metabolites can block cancer but in very specific cases may promote cancer. This has clinical implications that we will test in mice by adding a vitamin A-like drug to their food. At the basic level we have learned that vitamin A regulates an important mechanism that controls cancer cell death. However, there remain many open questions that we need to answer to generate as complete a picture as possible and better learn how to treat cancer using vitamin A-related drugs. |
