Cancer Biologist Quoted in PatientPower

Breast cancer researcher Dong Zhang, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical sciences at NYITCOM, is quoted in PatientPower, a news site dedicated to sharing information with cancer patients and survivors. Zhang, who researches targeted drug therapies for breast and ovarian cancers, explains that breast cancer treatment is typically tailored to the patient, with targeted therapy often used when a patient has a specific gene mutation coding for proteins that help tumors to grow and spread. Therapies work by interfering with these proteins. 

“When a patient is diagnosed with breast cancer, oncologists would then recommend sequencing the genome of the breast cancer to determine if one or more breast cancer susceptibility genes are mutated in this patient,” says Zhang. “Knowing the mutation profile of breast cancer can be very informative in selecting the most appropriate treatment strategy.”