UNC professor receives distinguished lectureship in breast cancer research
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Charles M. Perou, PhD, received the 2022 AACR Distinguished Lectureship in Breast Cancer Research at this year’s San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
Aflac Inc. supports the lectureship, which recognizes outstanding science that inspired or has the potential to inspire new perspectives on breast cancer etiology, diagnosis, treatment or prevention.
Perou is professor in the department of genetics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also is co-director of the computational medicine program, faculty director of Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center Bioinformatics Group and co-director of the cancer center’s breast cancer research program.
The lectureship recognizes Perou’s contributions to the understanding of breast cancer biology and treatment, as well as for his research in cancer genomics.
He used RNA expression profiling to reclassify breast tumors into five distinct subtypes. He also developed a 50-gene assay now approved by the FDA that helps predict metastasis among a subset of patients with breast cancer.
Perou also identified the association of the PAM50 basal-like breast cancer subtype with triple-negative breast cancer and germline BRCA1 mutation-associated cancers.
Perou served as breast cancer leader of The Cancer Genome Atlas Program. In this role, he utilized the database to determine that basal-like breast cancers are linked to molecular events that are genetically distinct from other breast cancers.
In addition, his discovery that basal-like breast cancer is overrepresented among Black women helped provide the basis for understanding the impact of intrinsic subtypes on racial disparities in breast cancer outcomes.
Perou presented an award lecture titled “Quantitative Medicine for Breast Cancer Patients” during this year’s symposium.
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