The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), a longtime co-sponsor of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium^®, will recognize two scientists for their significant contributions to breast cancer research during the 2024 SABCS^®.

Christina Curtis, PhD, MSc, is the 2024 recipient of the AACR Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research, supported by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. She will present an award lecture on Wednesday, December 11, at 3 p.m. CT in the Stars at Night Ballroom 1-2 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.

Steffi Oesterreich, PhD, is the 2024 recipient of the AACR Distinguished Lectureship in Breast Cancer Research, supported by Aflac, Inc. She will present an award lecture on Thursday, December 12, at 3 p.m. in the Stars at Night Ballroom 1-2 at the convention center.

AACR Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research

The AACR Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research was established to honor an investigator whose novel and significant work has had or may have a far-reaching impact on the etiology, detection, diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of breast cancer.

Dr. Curtis is the RZ Cao Professor of Medicine, Genetics, and Biomedical Data Science and Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cancer Genomics at Stanford University School of Medicine. She serves as the Director of Breast Cancer Translational Research and Co-Director of the Molecular Tumor Board at Stanford Cancer Institute.

Her early work helped redefine the molecular landscape of breast cancer, revealing 11 subgroups of disease with distinct genomic drivers and clinical outcomes and resolving the heterogeneity among the expression-based intrinsic subgroups. Those findings demonstrated that multiple subgroups of breast cancer are driven by copy number aberrations, similar to HER2-positive disease.

Using statistical modeling, Dr. Curtis built on these discoveries and provided an unprecedented view of the molecular alterations that lead to breast cancer recurrence. Her work has set the stage for evaluating new targeted therapies for patients with early-stage estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer who have a high risk of recurrence.

Dr. Curtis has developed multiple predictive biomarkers to guide patient stratification. She has also advanced the understanding of breast cancer evolution by providing quantitative evidence that breast cancer and other cancers can spread to metastatic sites early in the disease course.

AACR Distinguished Lectureship in Breast Cancer Research

The AACR Distinguished Lectureship in Breast Cancer Research was established to recognize outstanding science that has inspired, or has the potential to inspire, new perspectives on the etiology, diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of breast cancer.

Dr. Oesterreich is the Shear Family Foundation Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology at the University of Pittsburgh and Co-Leader of the Cancer Biology Program at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. She also serves as the Co-Director and Director of Education at the Women’s Cancer Research Center, a collaboration between UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and the Magee-Womens Research Institute.

She has made groundbreaking contributions in translational breast cancer research that have advanced the scientific understanding of invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) of the breast. Her work has led to a paradigm shift within the international research, clinical, and patient advocacy communities to recognize ILC as a distinct biological entity among breast cancers. Dr. Oesterreich has championed the need to diagnose and treat ILC differently from the more common invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), and to this end, she helped initiate the first clinical trial exclusively focused on patients with ILC.

Her early research focused on estrogen receptor alpha (ER) and anti-estrogen therapies. She helped report the first naturally occurring ER activating mutation in breast cancer, and she was one of the first scientists to examine how ER not only activates but also represses gene expression. Those findings expanded the understanding of the multifaceted roles of ER in regulating the breast cancer transcriptome and implicated ER-driven epigenetic reprogramming in resistance to endocrine therapy.