Kendall Nettles, Ph.D., an associate professor at The Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology, has received a five-year, $2.3 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to study the molecular mechanisms of hormone therapies to treat breast cancer.
Estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer can be treated with anti-hormone therapies, but it is common for patients to develop resistance.
The goal of the new project is to understand the molecular mechanisms of how different classes of estrogen receptor antagonists inhibit breast cancer growth. The researchers also aim to understand how expression of the epidermal growth factor receptor can cause resistance to tamoxifen, a hormone therapy.
Nettles is a member of the Cancer Center’s Cancer Therapeutics & Host Response research program. His lab uses structure-based approaches to design novel therapeutics to improve outcomes of cancer patients with treatment-resistant cancers. These include prostate and breast cancer, whose growth may be affected by stress or sex hormones.
He is collaborating on the new project with Ciaran Seath, Ph.D., an assistant professor of chemistry at UF Scripps.
