Breast Cancer: Current Research
Open Access

Abstract

Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is rare but the most lethal type of breast cancer. IBC is often associated with early metastasis and resistance to conventional therapies. Understanding biological insights that underlie the aggressive behavior of IBC and identifying novel therapeutic strategies are highly desirable for improvement of clinical outcome in patients with IBC. This presentation will cover the clinic-pathologic significance of some important biomarkers expression in a cohort of IBC that have long-term clinical follow-up and treatment information. Our results indicated that EZH2 and PD-L1 (clone 28-8) expression status may be used to identify a subset of patients who have a relatively worse prognosis. Targeting EZH2 also may provide a novel strategy for improving the clinical outcome of patients with IBC. In addition, androgen receptor expression was significantly associated with lymphovascular invasion. Additional information and discussion will be presented.

Biography

Yun Gong has received her MD degree in 1984 and then finished her Postgraduate Pathology training in 1989 at Zhejiang Medical University in China. She then worked as a Post-doctor and Research Associate in the Shanghai Institute of Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Catholic University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands and the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California. From 1998 to 2002, she has received her residency training in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, followed by one-year cytopathology fellowship training at MD Anderson Cancer Center. From 2003, she became a Faculty Member at the Dept. of Pathology, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and currently is a Full Professor. She has numerous publications in the fields of breast cancer research and cytopathology (120 peer-review articles, 18 invited articles, 6 book chapters and 1 book, 118 abstracts). She is an important collaborator of two IBC research projects that were funded by Susan G Komen Promise Grant. She is a Guest Editor of Breast Diseases: Year Book of Oncology since 2011, a Member of the study section of MD Anderson Institutional Research Grant Program, and was a reviewer for NCI/NIH on Business Innovation Research Contract Proposals in 2009 and 2013.

Email: yungong@mdanderson.org