Samantha R Oakes
Samantha Oakes received her PhD in Medical Science from the Garvan/St Vincent’s Clinical School, University of New South Wales in 2007, with funding from a NHMRC Dora Lush scholarship. The focus of her PhD was on understanding the role of prolactin receptor and its downstream targets during mammary gland development and cancer and she received the Garvan Institute of Medical Research thesis prize for this work.
Samantha’s work showed for the first time that the prolactin receptor was important for the earliest phases of carcinogenesis, and re-ignited the importance of the role of prolactin for breast cancer. These data also provided a potential explanation for the observation in the US Nurses Health Study that post-menopausal women with top quartile serum prolactin conferred a 2-fold higher relative risk of developing breast cancer.
Samantha’s work also contributed to the discovery that the Elf5 (a prolactin regulated gene) is the principal mediator of the alveolar cell fate for the mammary epithelium during pregnancy, and that it segregated with steroid-receptor positive mammary epithelial cells. The later result has important clinical applications for the treatment of basal-like breast cancer, and more recently has led to the discovery that Elf5 drives the claudin-low sub-type of breast cancer and is essential for the proliferation of estrogen insensitive breast cancers.
In 2008, Samantha received NHMRC Peter Doherty and National Breast Cancer Foundation fellowships and embarked on a Postdoctoral position at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne. The focus of her work during this time was to investigate the efficacy of BH3 mimetics for the treatment of breast cancer. Here, Samantha demonstrated that the BH3-mimetic ABT-737, which has high affinity for the pro-survival protein BCL-2, sensitised BCL-2 expressing triple negative breast cancers to conventional chemotherapy. ABT-737 is the lead compound for the new and orally available Navitoclax and ABT-199, which are currently in Phase I/II clinical trials for hematopoietic malignancies and will likely be extended to patients diagnosed with breast cancer.
In 2012, Samantha returned to Garvan to continue her work into understanding the cues that regulate cell survival in the mammary gland and in breast cancer. In 2013 Samantha received a National Breast Cancer Foundation Early Career Fellowship and has been appointed as Group leader. Samantha now leads a small team focussed on Cell Survival in the larger Cancer Biology laboratory headed by Professor Christopher Ormandy. Samantha remains committed to community participation and engagement through television and print media as well as public seminars and tours of the Garvan Institute.
Abstracts this author is presenting: