TBBCF Research Grant Recipients

A major problem that plagues breast cancer therapy is the resistance that some patients have to drugs that can treat this disease. Dr. li has discovered that patients with high levels of Lysosomalassociated protein transmembrane-4beta (LAPTM4B) are the very patients for whom chemotherapy is unsuccessful. This work alone is valuable in itself because it could be used to predict which patients will benefit from drug treatments and those who won’t.  Dr Li advanced this by studying what mechanistic role LAPTM4B is playing in the process. He believes that LAPTM4B enables tumor cells to eliminate naturally existing cell death triggers, thereby allowing the tumor to continue to grow.