PhD candidate is recipient of the 12th annual UM Ventures Graduate Translational Research Award.
Sydney Stern, a third-year PhD candidate in Professor Hongbing Wang's lab in the School of Pharmacy (SOP), was the recipient of the 2020 Graduate Translational Research (GTR) award in March.
Wang's group, in collaboration with Dr. Fengtian Xue's lab (also in SOP), has designed a promising new type of dual-activator compound with the potential to improve current cancer therapy.
At issue is the treatment of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), a disease associated with a poor prognosis and for which chemotherapy is the mainstay. While TNBC patients may be initially responsive to the chemotherapy regimen, a significant portion of patients succumb to their disease due to drug resistance and/or intolerable drug toxicities.
In her laboratory research, Stern showed that co-administering the novel compound along with the standard chemotherapy drugs makes the latter more effective and at the same time less toxic to healthy cardiac cells. The group’s ultimate goal is to advance this new type of dual-activator compound as a companion drug, with the promise to enhance the lives of breast cancer patients.
"Besides secondary tumors, cardiotoxicity is the leading cause of death amongst TNBC patients treated with cyclophosphamide and doxorubicin, the current chemotherapy treatment options. The novel compound we discovered would give medical providers a vital strategy to improve the chemotherapy regimen for patients."