Thank you so much for that kind
introduction and it's my great pleasure
to be this years speaker for the Women's
Partnership in Science luncheon I just
figured I'd that I actually have
something in common with the honorary
Freddie Stallar I think we work out of
the same CrossFit gym. I didn't know that until now so thats a coincidence, maybe not.
So I'm gonna talk to you about breast cancer
research here at the labs today but
before that I'll talk a bit about myself
and how I ended up at Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory by now you probably picked up
on some accent and you would be right um
I am actually German so English is my
second language and I am from the
beautiful city of Regensburg which is
about an hour from Munich in case you've
heard about that Ocktoberfest time is just around 
the corner and my hometown is really very
beautiful if you ever get the chance you
should visit with a thousand years old
cathedral and a thousand years old stone
bridge and the entire city center is a
unesco world heritage because it's so
old and they're very proud of it I was
born there raised there I went to
college and also got my PhD in
biochemistry there and now you may
wonder so how did I move from there to
here of course you know that Cold Spring 
Harbor Laboratory is a Research
Institute and you may have heard that it
is also a hotspot for conferences and
these conferences are really world
renowned everyone knows about them and
everyone wants to participate in them
and so did I when I was a grad student
so in the last year of my PhD I actually
managed to come and participate in one
of these conferences this was in 2012
and I was very very lucky I actually got
the chance to give a presentation give a
talk about my research there and it got
even better because after my talk David
Spector we can see on the slide here
who is one of the organizers of this
particular conference but also the
director of research here he walked up
to me and he said well it was a great
talk
what is your future plan would you like
to come and work for me so you know if Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory offers you a job
you don't really think about it twice
so I went
back home I told my PhD supervisor so
listen I have to finish now because I have a
job offer and he agreed he says there was
really an opportunity that could not
possibly pass on so I could be a road
off defendant and one month later I
already was here while I was brand-new
when this picture was taken we were
actually celebrating James Watson's 45th
anniversary here which is very
exciting and Cold Spring Harbor is a
very welcoming very international place
so within a few weeks I actually had a
bunch of new friends as you can see here
and they're very happy to say that I'm
still in touch four years later with all
of them and they have grown very dear to
my heart now there is one man in
particular on the slide that I'm gonna
point out and this the gentleman whose
shirt is not tucked in his name is Ron
Herridge and long story very short that's
just a few months ago we got married.
::applause::
He is originally from New Zealand
so you can see the New Zealand scenery in
the back also great for vacation so really
there is fantastic people here at Cold Spring Harbor
there is also really great science though and I will switch over to the science part now
So I will talk about breast cancer and the
research progress that we have made here
recently and specifically in terms of
metastatic breast cancer which is what I
work on let's start with some numbers
statistically one in eight women will
get breast cancer during her lifetime
now that is a lot of women right so we
have about 250 people in this room today
so if you just think about it it's very
likely that some of you may have some
personal experiences maybe a family
member, a colleague at work,
a friend or maybe even survivors
yourself so it is really the most common
cancer still in the USA or in all of the
developed world for that matter out of
these women and get breast cancer
one in three actually developed
something that we call metastatic breast
cancer now what's that metastatic breast
cancer means that the cancer is now
moving out of the breast to under parts
of the body and this is usually the
brain, the lungs, the bone or the liver
now you can imagine as soon as the
cancer spreads to other organs
especially vital ones like the brain or
the lungs so there's not usually the
best of all news that one can have and
we are specifically focusing on this
group of patients where the cancer has
already spread and tried to develop new
more efficient better treatments for
metastatic breast cancer patients now of
course you could say well this sounds
great but isn't everyone kind of trying
to do this there must be hundreds if not
thousands of researchers around
the world who all try to cure breast
cancer or metastatic breast cancer and
you would be right so I'm going to spend
the next few minutes on explaining why
our approach here is so unique so
special and
I'll show you some of our results that
we have that I think are very very
promising for that I'll take you on the
journey into the body so you probably
know that all living organisms including
the human body consists of tiny units
that we call cells and inside these cells is a
genetic information the DNA wrapped up
in chromosomes and this DNA is now
what's inherited down from the parents
to the child see the our genes that
this watch makes us us this is what
gives us our phenotype this is how it take our
hair color, eye color into account for
example now how does DNA to do that
actually there is something that we call
the central dogma of molecular biology
and this is very simplified we have a
piece of DNA a gene and that goes to two
processes the first one is called
transcription and then it makes
something that's called
an RNA molecule and then in the second
step it's translated into something
that's called a protein when you think of
protein you may think about a steak,
chicken breast, Greek yogurt something that
you can eat right protein rich
however our body is also made of
proteins for example our muscles are out
here there would be samples for proteins
in our body and these proteins are
encoded by our genes by our DNA and this
is basically the worldview for
scientists for the last decades until
thanks to new emerging technologies we
figured out this principle isn't always
accurate and in fact there are genes
there are stretches of DNA that are
transcribed into an RNA module but never
make it into a protein and because they
don't code for a protein because in
non-coding or ncRNAs now you could argue
while this doesn't sound like
it's very important if we haven't known
about this for so long how many of those
non-coding RNAs can really be there in
the cell it's actually quite a lot as
this pie chart illustrates the only
about a third of all human genes make
proteins the other 2/3 do not and now if
you think about it in terms of breast
cancer research and drug development
everything that's on the clinic right
now is focused on this 1/3 of genes that
makes proteins and we haven't really
explored the other 2/3 so it's very
possible that new and better treatments
new and better targets are within these
2/3 these tens of thousands of genes
that we haven't explored yet so this is
exactly what we're doing in our lab and
we look specifically into one
subcategory that are called long
non-coding RNAs because they're long fairly
simple and there is about a quarter of
all genes in the human body that encode
for these long non-coding RNAs so almost
as many as there is protein
hence we figured there must be some of
them that are important in cancer and we
actually we're right with it
we developed new drugs that can get rich
off these cancer specific non-coding RNAs
and now one of the big problems in drug
development is as you certainly know
side effects right
so anyone who has ever seen a cancer
patient receiving chemotherapy you know that
they often lose their hair, they feel very
nauseous, very weak in general and that's
because the commonly available
chemotherapeutics they target all the
cells in the body that are currently
dividing healthy or cancer so we are
trying to find something that is very
specific only for the cancer cells and
does not attack any of the healthy cells
in the hopes that we can get rid of
these terrible side effects that we have
at the moment
so how does this work we basically go
into the cell right now and here's one
example of one of these non-coding RNAs
and we developed new drugs for them
they are called antisense oligonucleotides
but it really doesn't matter so much what
they are called I'll show you how they work
so they bind very very specifically to
this one RNA that wanted to bind to you
its the only prison in the cancer cells
other than healthy cells and now this
formation triggers something in the cell
and enzyme that's already there that
detects the structure and cuts and it's
a sign for the cell to get rid of this
RNA so now we are rich of these
cancer-causing well coded RNA what
does that mean for the cell but we can
test it in a dish so what we can do is
we can grow little mini tumors we
call them organized or metastatic breast
cancer and just test our new drugs in
the dish now these mini tumors these
organoids look like that under the
microscope and you can see that they
make arms in all directions right and
that's how very aggressive cancer would
look like it tries to invade the
surrounding tissues it tries to move
out it tries to metastasize and if we
treat them with our drug you can see
that these arms actually go away it's a
very very smooth surface and now we made
something that's very aggressive into
something a lot less aggressive and that
works too if we go into an actual tumor
so here we show you some data about
our mouse models of breast cancer that we
are using first of all this would be a
section of a tumor of an untreated
animal now everything that's purple on
the slide is cancer
all the pebble things are cancer cells
it can see it's densely packed all of it is
cancer basically and now the moment we
treat it it actually clears up quite
spectacularly there's only a few of
these purple cells left and the rest is
white so what's this white area
it's actually energy and it's
fluid-filled
so what we're generating is out of a
very aggressive metastatic breast tumor
we make a lot less aggressive right so
basically a fluid-filled structure and
of course I mentioned at the beginning
that our main goal is to get rid of
metastasis and we do that too as you can
see here in black would be animals that
have not been treated and they have a
lot of metastases in the lungs and in red
the animals that have been treated
with our new drug and they have about a
70 to 80 percent reduction of metastasis
which is really quite spectacular
so now we can reduce very aggressive
tumors to alot less aggressive ones we can get
rid of metastases and these results have
been so promising and so exciting that
my mentor David Spector recently formed
a task force with some of the best breast
oncologists and researchers in the
country to figure out how we can push
this into clinical trials as soon as
possible.
