Publications by Cathrin Brisken

Breaking the Rhythm: Harnessing the Menstrual Cycle for Better Chemotherapy

A recent publication by Bornes and colleagues explored the impact of the estrous cycle on mammary tumor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Using genetically engineered mouse models, Bornes and colleagues revealed that chemotherapy is less effective when ...

AMER ASSOC CANCER RESEARCH2025

Mimicking women’s endocrine milieu in mice for women’s health-related studies

Cathrin Brisken, Laura Battista, Céline Berthe Constantin, Valentina Scabia, Csaba Ferenc László

To improve preclinical studies and their translation, patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) are increasingly used. They have human-specific tumor characteristics and reflect intra and inter-tumor heterogeneity. However, the endocrine milieu differs between hum ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2025

CDK4 inactivation inhibits apoptosis via mitochondria-ER contact remodeling in triple-negative breast cancer

Cathrin Brisken, Carlos Henrique Venturi Ronchi

The energetic demands of proliferating cells during tumorigenesis require close coordination between the cell cycle and metabolism. While CDK4 is known for its role in cell proliferation, its metabolic function in cancer, particularly in triple-negative br ...

Nature Research2025

biogrowleR: Enhancing Longitudinal Data Analysis

Cathrin Brisken, Giovanna Ambrosini, Andrea Agnoletto, Carlos Henrique Venturi Ronchi, Hazel Margaret Quinn

Time course measurements are used for many applications in biomedical research, ranging from growth curves to drug efficacy testing and high-throughput screening. Statistical methods used to analyze the resulting longitudinal data, such as t-tests or repea ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2025

Hormone Signaling in Breast Development and Cancer

Cathrin Brisken, Andrea Agnoletto

Hormones control normal breast development and function. They also impinge on breast cancer (BC) development and disease progression in direct and indirect ways. The major ovarian hormones, estrogens and progesterone, have long been established as key regu ...

2025

Is There a Special Role for Ovarian Hormones in the Pathogenesis of Lobular Carcinoma?

Cathrin Brisken, Georgios Sflomos

Lobular carcinoma represent the most common special histological subtype of breast cancer, with the majority classed as hormone receptor positive. Rates of invasive lobular carcinoma in postmenopausal women have been seen to increase globally, while other ...

Endocrine Soc2024

Rapid autopsies to enhance metastatic research: the UPTIDER post-mortem tissue donation program

Cathrin Brisken, Laura Battista

Research on metastatic cancer has been hampered by limited sample availability. Here we present the breast cancer post-mortem tissue donation program UPTIDER and show how it enabled sampling of a median of 31 (range: 5-90) metastases and 5-8 liquids per pa ...

Nature Portfolio2024

EMBER creates a unified space for independent breast cancer transcriptomic datasets enabling precision oncology

Cathrin Brisken, Carlos Henrique Venturi Ronchi

Transcriptomics has revolutionized biomedical research and refined breast cancer subtyping and diagnostics. However, wider use in clinical practice is hampered for a number of reasons including the application of transcriptomic signatures as single sample ...

2024

TGF beta-mediated MMP13 secretion drives myoepithelial cell dependent breast cancer progression

Cathrin Brisken, Andrea Agnoletto

Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is a non-obligate precursor of invasive breast cancer. Virtually all women with DCIS are treated, despite evidence suggesting up to half would remain with stable, non-threatening, disease. Overtreatment thus presents a press ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Using deep learning-based approaches to characterise ageing in different tissue components of normal breast tissue of women with different risk of developing breast cancer

Cathrin Brisken, Fabio De Martino

Wiley2023

Targeting the Progesterone Receptor in Breast Cancer: Mind the Short Form!

Cathrin Brisken, Carlos Henrique Venturi Ronchi

The presurgical window of opportunity trial (WOT) MIPRA provides evidence that neoadjuvant treatment with the prog-esterone receptor (PR) antagonist mifepristone (RU486) may benefit patients with estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer characterized ...

AMER ASSOC CANCER RESEARCH2023

Method for hormone or drug screening in a tissue sample

Cathrin Brisken, Yueyun Zhang, Christoph Merten

The present invention relates to a method for analyzing cellular responsiveness to hormones or drags in a tissue sample based on an alginate-based 3D ex vivo culture system for normal and malignant tissue microstructures and uses thereof. ...

2023

Tumor dormancy: EMT beyond invasion and metastasis

Cathrin Brisken, Patrik Aouad, Hazel Margaret Quinn

More than two-thirds of cancer-related deaths are attributable to metastases. In some tumor types metastasis can occur up to 20 years after diagnosis and successful treatment of the primary tumor, a phenomenon termed late recurrence. Metastases arise from ...

WILEY2023

Optimized Modeling of Metastatic Triple-Negative Invasive Lobular Breast Carcinoma

Cathrin Brisken, Laura Battista, Georgios Sflomos

Simple Summary Invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) is the second most common histologic subtype of breast cancer and is often detected at an advanced stage. Up to 30% of ILC cases relapse and present a challenge for treatment. Unfortunately, there are few mod ...

MDPI2023

Estrogen receptor positive breast cancers have patient specific hormone sensitivities and rely on progesterone receptor

Cathrin Brisken, Giovanna Ambrosini, Ayyakkannu Ayyanan, Laura Battista, Valentina Scabia, Csaba Ferenc László, Fabio De Martino, Andrea Agnoletto

Estrogen and progesterone receptor (ER, PR) signaling control breast development and impinge on breast carcinogenesis. ER is an established driver of ER + disease but the role of the PR, itself an ER target gene, is debated. We assess the issue in clinical ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Epithelial-mesenchymal plasticity determines estrogen receptor positive breast cancer dormancy and epithelial reconversion drives recurrence

Cathrin Brisken, Giovanna Ambrosini, Georgios Sflomos, Patrik Aouad, Fabio De Martino, Yueyun Zhang, Céline Marie Victoria Stibolt, Kelly Spry Maggs, Hazel Margaret Quinn

More than 70% of human breast cancers (BCs) are estrogen receptor α-positive (ER+). A clinical challenge of ER+ BC is that they can recur decades after initial treatments. Mechanisms governing latent disease remain elusive due to lack of adequate in vivo m ...

Nature Research2022

RNA sequencing-based single sample predictors of molecular subtype and risk of recurrence for clinical assessment of early-stage breast cancer

Cathrin Brisken, Ayyakkannu Ayyanan, Rachel Marcone

Multigene assays for molecular subtypes and biomarkers can aid management of early invasive breast cancer. Using RNA-sequencing we aimed to develop single-sample predictor (SSP) models for clinical markers, subtypes, and risk of recurrence (ROR). A cohort ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

Intraductal xenografts show lobular carcinoma cells rely on their own extracellular matrix and LOXL1

Philipp Bucher, Cathrin Brisken, Giovanna Ambrosini, Ayyakkannu Ayyanan, Laura Battista, Georgios Sflomos, Valentina Scabia, Maryse Fiche, Patrik Aouad, Fabio De Martino

Invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) is the most frequent special histological subtype of breast cancer, typically characterized by loss of E‐cadherin. It has clinical features distinct from other estrogen receptor‐positive (ER+) breast cancers but the molecul ...

2021

Deep Learning Enables Individual Xenograft Cell Classification in Histological Images by Analysis of Contextual Features

Michaël Unser, Daniel Sage, Olivier Burri, Cathrin Brisken, Quentin Juppet, Fabio De Martino, Martin Weigert

Patient-Derived Xenografts (PDXs) are the preclinical models which best recapitulate inter- and intra-patient complexity of human breast malignancies, and are also emerging as useful tools to study the normal breast epithelium. However, data analysis gener ...

2021

Atlas of Lobular Breast Cancer Models: Challenges and Strategic Directions

Cathrin Brisken

Simple Summary: Invasive lobular breast cancer (ILC) is the second most common histological subtype of invasive breast cancer, which is noted to have a unique microscopic appearance. The understanding of ILC biology is advancing through the evolution of va ...

MDPI2021