Regua earns women’s cancers development award
Angelina Regua, PhD, assistant professor in the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery, was awarded a 2-year, $206,000 grant from the Victoria’s Secret Global Fund for Women’s Cancers Career Development Award, in partnership with Pelotonia and the American Association for Cancer Research.
“I am honored to receive this award from the AACR,” Regua said. “This award provides me with the opportunity to investigate a novel therapeutic target in breast cancer brain metastases, with the ultimate goal of improving therapeutic intervention of patients with metastatic breast cancers.”
According to Regua, there is a critical and unmet need to identify effective therapies for patients with triple-negative breast cancers (TNBC) that develop breast cancer brain metasteses (BCBM), which occur in up to 50 percent of patients with TNBC and has a survival of just 4-6 months following diagnosis.
“A major challenge for treating BCBM is the lack of targeted therapies that permeate the blood-brain-barrier,” Regua said. “Therefore, the overarching goal of our project is to identify novel treatment strategies to suppress BCBM without toxicity and eliminate mortality of patients with metastatic breast cancers.”
The Victoria’s Secret Global Fund for Women’s Cancers was established to accelerate innovation in cancer research for women, by women. The groundbreaking initiative funds innovative research aimed at progressing outcomes for women’s cancers and invests in the next generation of women scientists who represent the diverse population they serve.
The aim of the award is to foster innovation in the understanding, prevention, interception, early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of breast and gynecologic cancers with the goal of eliminating health disparities and improving patient outcomes. The research proposed in funding may be in basic, translational, clinical, or population sciences.
Regua received her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology in 2018 in the lab of Dr. Leszek Kotula at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, N.Y. She completed postdoctoral training in the lab of Dr. Hui-Wen Lo at Wake Forest University Baptists Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., before joining Lo in the Department of Neurosurgery at McGovern Medical School.