Mike Dixon: Breast Cancer Now Edinburgh Research Team

Research Programme

Our current research interests include understanding why some patients fail to response to commonly used cancer treatments such as endocrine therapy, and working towards developing tests which could be used in the clinic to identify those patients who are unlikely to respond.

Our EndoAdjuvant2 model has been shown to predict patients at risk of recurrence on endocrine therapy and is moving towards a clinical trial in the UK and USA. We also have a number of international collaborations currently underway where we are using deep sequencing approaches with unique cohorts of patient tissues including serial biopsies collected over time from patients who develop resistance to multiple endocrine therapies. In so doing, we hope to gain a better understanding of the driving mutations and underlying mechanisms of acquired resistance and approaches for their circumvention, such as assessing the potential for the use of HER2-targeted therapies to treat those patients resistant to endocrine therapy who overexpress the HER2 protein.

Other work currently underway will investigate the molecular differences between primary and metastatic disease.