
Zoltan Szallasi, MD
If not for BCRF and PFP, we would not have been able to identify other, therapeutically targetable DNA repair defects in breast cancer beyond homologous recombination deficiency (HRD)- the target of PARP inhibitor therapy. This has allowed us to identify new strategies to tackle therapy resistant and aggressive breast cancers.
Senior Research Scientist, Informatics Program
Boston Children’s Hospital
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Harvard Medical School
Boston, Massachusetts
Areas of Focus: Treatment, Tumor Biology
CURRENT RESEARCH
Goal: To identify deficiencies in DNA repair that can be precisely targeted in aggressive breast cancers.
Impact: Dr. Szallasi aims to discover defects in DNA repair pathways—found in triple negative and all BRCA-driven breast cancers—that can be precisely targeted therapeutically. His discoveries could lead to new, more effective treatments for breast cancer and advance precision medicine.
What’s next: He and his colleagues will continue to develop tools that could potentially identify all breast cancers that can be treated with a class of drugs called PARP inhibitors.
Defects in DNA repair pathways are an underlying cause of the development and progression of breast cancer, and these defects often determine how a patient will respond to particular therapies. Dr. Szallasi is developing methods of identifying breast cancers with alterations in the DNA repair pathway—an advance that is crucial for determining which patients will benefit from PARP inhibitors, a class of drugs that has been successful in treating those whose tumors harbor these defects.
BIO
Dr. Szallasi received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Medicine in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1988. He did postdoctoral research in molecular pharmacology of cancer at the National Cancer Institute. As a faculty member, first at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences and currently at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he has become active in the high throughput analysis of breast cancer. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, mainly on the molecular pharmacology and high throughput analysis of cancer.
Dr. Szallasi’s group is interested in the application of high throughput measurements for cancer research. They implemented several methods that increased the reliability of microarray and next generation sequencing measurements. They are also interested in approaches that combine genomic scale measurements in a manner that describe essential cancer biology in a robust fashion. Dr. Szallasi is currently developing methods that determine and quantify specific DNA repair pathway aberrations in human tumor biopsies. This work led to a DNA aberration profile-based method that predicts response to platinum-based therapy with high accuracy, and which is currently in the final stages of comprehensive clinical validation.