The application of high-throughput and multi-omics technologies in breast cancer has led to new approaches for analyzing tumor composition, studying tumor behavior, and observing how tumor features relate to pathogenesis or drug response.

During the 2025 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium^®, experts will discuss spatial proteomic, metabolomic, and transcriptomic approaches in Translational Workshop 1: Spatial Omics for Prediction, Prognostication, and Mechanistic Insights on Tuesday, December 9, from 12:45 to 2:15 p.m. CT in Stars at Night Ballroom 1-2 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.

Sandro Santagata, MD, PhD, will present new research on applying proteomic spatial profiling to understanding drug response and resistance to new and emerging classes of drugs, such as antibody-drug conjugates. Dr. Santagata is Associate Professor of Systems Biology and Associate Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“The techniques that Dr. Santagata adapted are great for the laboratory, but also he is developing them in a practical way so that — hopefully in the very near future — they can be adapted as new biomarkers and companion diagnostics that can be applied in real time at clinics,” said Session Moderator Leif Ellisen, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine at Harvard University and Director of the Cancer Center Program in Breast Medical Oncology at Mass General Cancer Center.

Drawing on expertise in how tumor metabolic dysregulation and tumor metabolism govern the behavior of many cancers, including breast cancer, Ralph DeBerardinis, MD, PhD, will discuss how in vivo, three-dimensional spatial analysis of tumors has led to new insights. Dr. DeBerardinis, Director of the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development and Director of the Genetic and Metabolic Disease Program at UT Southwestern Medical Center, will also review recent work on how metabolic rewiring might be driving some of the most challenging problems in breast cancer, such as brain metastases.

“I think many of us in the field believe this is an exciting path forward for understanding how we might selectively provide more effective therapy for brain metastases based on the specific metabolic changes that occur in these metastatic cells in the brain,” Dr. Ellisen said.

Daniel Abravanel, MD, PhD, Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a physician-scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, will share insights on transcriptomics, including recent work that has developed a single-cell and spatial gene expression atlas of breast cancer metastases.

“The heterogeneity of the metastatic growth and the heterogeneity of tumors and how they behave at different metastatic sites is a big challenge in the field — we have a very poor understanding of it,” Dr. Ellisen said. “Dr. Abravanel’s work has been able to look at different metastatic sites and how their commonalities and differences might give us insights into the specific metastatic contexts, not just metastatic versus primary tumor, but also how we might most effectively treat a liver metastasis versus a lung metastasis or a brain metastasis.”

Dr. Ellisen noted that these insights might also be applicable to other areas of inquiry in the breast cancer field, such as how the biology of breast cancer tumors in young women might be different from those in postmenopausal women.

“We believe that going deeply and understanding not just the tumor cell, but its entire spatial and micro-environmental context, will help us to unravel the puzzle of breast cancer in young women and more effectively treat it,” Dr. Ellisen said.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) is another topic that has impacted the field of spatial omics in breast cancer. Dr. Ellisen said. AI diagnostic capabilities are highly promising, including the use of AI to interpret spatial omics data from tissue samples from large clinical trials.

“That allows us to understand not only general tumor behavior prognostication, but also to predict treatment-specific response,” Dr. Ellisen said.

He added that as the AI spatial omics programs become more widely available and more flexible, they may allow researchers “to do more, particularly in the therapeutic setting — to tie these findings to specific therapies, predict responses to therapies, and understand both acquired and de novo drug resistance.”

Dr. Ellisen said he is excited to hear about these prospects from various experts at the panel session, which will also include contributions from patient advocate Jane Perlmutter, PhD, MBA, founder of Gemini Group.

“I think that’s the beauty of these sessions,” Dr. Ellisen said. “We have these individual experts who will discuss what they see as possibilities for integrating new information, and we look forward to the audience of experts thinking about and discussing how we can accelerate this progress in our specific fields and integrate it into additional research and clinical practice.”