Xandra Breakefield,
Professor,
Mass General Hospital (MGH)/Harvard Medical School
Xandra Breakefield, Ph.D. is a basic scientist with a strong background in molecular genetics and neuroscience. She focuses her research efforts on: gene therapy for neurologic diseases; and elucidation of the role of extracellular vesicles (EVs) released from cancer cells in tumor progression. She led early studies demonstrating mutant RNA in serum EVs from glioblastoma patients as biomarkers. She did her undergraduate work at Wilson College and her graduate work in Microbial Genetics at Georgetown University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Marshall Nirenberg at the NIH. She is currently Professor of Neurology in the Neuroscience Program at Harvard Medical School and Geneticist in the Neurology and Radiology Services at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Professor Breakefield has received a number of awards for her work, including a McKnight Foundation Neuroscience Development Award, two Javits Neuroscience Investigator Awards, the Society for Neuroscience Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Harvard Medical School William Silen Lifetime Achievement Mentoring Award. She is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and past president of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.
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The Evil Little Things About Cancer: EVs as Infiltrators and InformantsMonday, 16 November 2015 at 11:30 Tumor cells release an abundance of extracellular vesicles which contain protein, RNA and DNA cargo. Studies are actively ongoing to determine the different types of tumor-derived vesicles and the function of their cargo, which appears to be designed to change the phenotype of many types of normal cells in favor of tumor progression. These evil-intentioned vesicles have two possible Achilles’ heels. In the first case, they can be isolated from biofluids of the cancer patient and used to inform on the mutational stratagem of the tumors and hence provide clues as to effective treatment strategies. In the second case, vesicles may be transformed into therapeutic vehicles to “silently” attack the tumors.
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