By Laura Sage | Co-Founder
Dear Friends,
This time of year finds many of us reflecting on the past year and looking hopefully towards the next. While The Lynn Sage Foundation is anxious to start 2017 with multiple Lynn Sage Scholars for the first time, it is never easy to part with the current Scholar. It has been an honor to support Dr. Athan Vassilopoulos these past two years, and we look forward to Dr. Vassilopoulos staying involved with The Lynn Sage Foundation in an advisory role.
Dr. Vassilopoulos’ lab is focused on explaining the role of sirtuins, which is a gene family implicated in age-related diseases, such as breast cancer. They have been actively exploring two particular members of the sirtuin family, SIRT2 and SIRT3, in both normal mammary stem cells and breast cancer stem cells. Their results in this area provide solid evidence to support a novel role of sirtuins in breast tumor initiation and potential therapeutic applications. Additionally, they were also able to initiate and complete the first phase of a chemical library screen to identify new compounds aimed at targeting a subgroup of breast tumors characterized by low expression of sirtuins.
While Dr. Vassilopoulos will enjoy watching his two young children discover what Santa delivers this holiday season, he is most hopeful for continued funding for his lab. “Early research funding is extremely important as it gives the opportunity, especially to junior faculty, to explore and develop their innovative ideas,” comments Dr. Vassilopoulos. “Without doubt, the generous support from The Lynn Sage Foundation in my lab gave us a great opportunity to move our ideas forward. It was really inspiring in the past two years to experience first-hand how committed the Lynn Sage Foundation community is to supporting innovative breast cancer research.”
Given the encouraging findings from their research and initial screen, Dr. Vassilopoulos hopes to continue his breast cancer work with the sirtuin family. He is planning to initiate a project focused on cancer prevention. Based on previous results showing the beneficial effect of nutritional interventions, such as calorie restriction, on slowing down age-related diseases, Dr. Vassilopoulos and his lab will explore the mechanistic role of sirtuins in mediating this effect on breast cancer.
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