Magee-Womens Research Institute & Foundation

My interests include resistance to endocrine therapy, mechanism of metastases, and unique biology of invasive lobular breast cancer, and what I value most is working in large transdisciplinary teams and mentoring the next generation of breast cancer researchers.
Steffi Oesterreich, PhD

Research in Brief

Dr Oesterreich’s area of interest is endocrine resistance and metastatic disease in breast cancer. Her group studies mutations and epigenetic changes that lead to resistance to commonly used hormonal therapies that such Tamoxifen and Aromatase inhibitors. One focus area is the understanding of invasive lobular cancer, an understudied histological breast cancer subtype that affects 26,000-39,000 patients per year in the US alone. To reach the goal of translating findings into the clinic, she works in transdisciplinary teams, including medical oncologists, surgeons, biostatisticians, bioinformaticians and pathologists. All of these studies include many aspects of translational breast cancer research utilizing basic biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, cell lines, rodent models and clinical samples from retrospective cohort studies, and from clinical trials.