Nayar Laboratory
Research. Teaching. Public Health.
The major reason people die of breast cancer is because their cancer has become resistant to targeted therapies (i.e. drugs that target a specific pro-growth molecule or pathway).
The Nayar Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University is dedicated to the study of therapeutic resistance in breast cancer. Equally important to our mission is the training of the next generation of cancer researchers. Our goal is to lessen the public health burden of breast cancer through science.
Research
Therapeutic resistance in breast cancer
The Nayar laboratory is focused on the biology of therapeutic resistance in breast cancer. Dr. Nayar recently identified a subset of estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer that is resistant to ER-targeted therapy by acquiring mutations in the growth factor molecule HER2. The laboratory aims to understand the underlying mechanism(s) by which a tumor becomes resistant to targeted therapy, employing this subset of breast cancer as a model.
Transcriptional control of resistance
See: Jeselsohn et al., Cancer Cell 2018
We use genomic footprinting technologies to study transcriptional networks in HER2-mutant breast cancer.
Oncogene variant-to-function
We employ deep mutational scanning technologies to comprehensively characterize mutations in important oncogenes in breast cancer.
Therapeutic vulnerabilities of resistant breast cancer
We employ whole-genome screening technologies to identify novel biological dependencies and therapeutic vulnerabilities in targeted therapy-resistant breast cancer.
Inflammation and breast cancer
See: No background readings available
We are exploring the roles of inflammatory signaling in targeted therapy-resistant breast cancer.
Contact Us
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