Titles and Affiliations

Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

Research area

Targeting metastatic breast cancer at the nexus of cancer progression and immune response.


Metastatic breast cancer (MBC)—when breast cancer spreads throughout the body—is incurable and responsible for the majority of breast cancer deaths. Dr. Kang and his team identified a protein, Metadherin (MTDH), that is generated by many breast tumors and its presence predicts poor outcome for patients. The team found that MTDH promotes both metastasis and chemoresistance in cancer cells and helps tumors evade the immune system, making it a promising target for therapy. It is also present in immune cells, but the role of MTDH in immune cells is unknown. Dr. Kang’s team will explore this further to see if blocking MTDH could help promote an anti-tumor response by the immune system. The findings from this research may pave the way toward a new immunotherapy approach for metastatic breast cancer.

Progress Thus Far

The team developed a drug to target MTDH and found that it dramatically inhibits breast cancer progression and metastasis by enhancing immune cell infiltration into the tumors. This occurs in part because MTDH helps suppress antigen presentation by the tumor cells. This is a process by which all cells in the body share their identities with immune cells and is required for the immune cells to detect foreign or abnormal activity. The team also tested their MTDH drug in combination with anti-PD-1 therapy (a type of immunotherapy) and the two worked well together to suppress breast cancer progression. These results are exciting but do not answer the question of how MTDH inhibition might also affect the immune system.

What’s next

In the coming year, the team will perform experiments to identify the role of MTDH in immune cells. In laboratory models, they will compare how immune cells behave with and without MTDH and identify other molecular components that contribute to MTDH’s effects. 




BCRF Investigator Since