Faculty & Staff

Over the past decade as a molecular pathologist, Dr Jyoti S Prabhu has been a core member of a team which has assembled and followed-up a cohort of 450 breast cancer patients for 9 years with a loss to follow up of less than 5%. This project was funded primarily by long-term philanthropic grants and was designed not only to identify the molecular alterations in breast cancer specimens from Indian women, but also look into the demographic and psycho social aspects of the problem. In addition to a detailed documentation of the demographic, histological, clinical and laboratory information, including long-term outcomes, they have established a bio-bank comprising formalin fixed tumor tissue and blood specimens from subjects enrolled in the study after appropriate informed consent and ethical approval. The patients in this cohort were enrolled from 3 tertiary care centres by establishing stable working relationships with surgical and medical oncologists and onco-pathologists. The cohort has a median follow up of more than 72 months. They have estimated the levels of many dozens of molecular markers and examined their correlations to prognosis and response to therapy. As a consequence of this study, they have standardized all of the techniques for performing molecular analyses on nucleic acids and proteins, derived from formalin fixed material. Detailed examination of the data from this cohort has further confirmed the observations reported on pattern of breast cancer in Indian women and showed that though the proportional distribution of hormone receptor negative and triple negative breast cancer is higher in India, the clinical and biological behaviour of a specific subtype is no different from that reported from elsewhere in the world.

Her current project is an extension of this work with specific focus on premenopausal breast cancer. The broad objective of this proposal is to find a clinical approach towards minimizing the risk of recurrence of breast cancer in premenopausal women. She proposes to identify the key pathways activated by the interaction of circulating hormones with their cognate nuclear receptors that in addition to estrogen and progesterone includes androgens, glucocorticoids and vitamin D. Their hypothesis is that the cross-talk of hormonally activated pathways in the background of high levels of circulating sex steroids in premenopausal women influences the development of therapeutic resistance in distinct ways.