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, Valentina Scabia, Céline Berthe Constantin, 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, Hazel Margaret Quinn, Carlos Henrique Venturi Ronchi, Andrea Agnoletto

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