Can a treatment for leukemia and lymphoma work for breast cancer?
Sarah Cooley, M.D., first worked with Jeffrey Miller, M.D., when she was a University of Minnesota medical student. Now as an assistant professor of medicine at the University and a clinical research scholar with Miller as her mentor, she represents the newest generation of researchers making discoveries at the Masonic Cancer Center. In her research, Cooley is taking an innovative approach to treating breast cancer, which is a solid tumor cancer. She is applying a cell-based therapy that has previously been used primarily in patients with hematological malignancies (blood cancers). This approach builds on both Miller’s work on hematological malignancies and studies that Cooley completed during her time in Miller’s laboratory as a student. That early work demonstrated that breast cancer cells grown in culture dishes were very susceptible to a process where cells called “natural killer (NK)” cells attach and destroy cancer cells, and therefore might be good targets for NK cell-based ther
