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| Name |
Polyak, Kornelia |
| Location
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Dana-Farber Cancer Institute |
| Primary Field
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Medical Genetics, Hematology and Oncology |
 Election Citation
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Polyak's research works to improving the clinical management of breast cancer patients by understanding of breast tumor evolution. |
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Research Interests
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Kornelia Polyak's laboratory is dedicated to improving the clinical management of breast cancer patients by understanding of breast tumor evolution. She has devoted much effort to develop new ways to study tumors as a whole and to apply interdisciplinary approaches. She demonstrated that gene expression and epigenetic alterations occur in all cell types during breast tumor progression and proposed that the progression of in situ to invasive breast carcinomas is promoted by microenvironmental alterations. They found that in situ carcinoma progression is limited by an activate immune environment that becomes muted in invasive tumors. She has also made revolutionary contributions to the tumor heterogeneity field. Her lab was one of the first to characterize cellular phenotypic and genetic heterogeneity in breast cancer and developed new technologies to study tumors at the single cell level in situ and as ecosystems. She has been investigating the functional relevance of intratumor subclonal heterogeneity and determined that non-cell-autonomous drivers play a key role in this process. |
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