In the era of precision medicine, efforts are coordinated towards tailoring medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient to achieve the right therapy, in the right patient at the right time. Despite advances in therapeutics, a large proportion of breast cancer patients continues to demonstrate no response to available treatments, resistance to certain drugs and/ or intolerance to treatment due to toxicity. The need to expand current knowledge on key genetic and molecular drivers of this heterogenous disease is urgent and the identification of biomarkers adopting the precision medicine paradigm is essential.
The main objective of the project «precision medicine in breast cancer: biomarker identification» run by the Translational Research & Precision Medicine Team at the Cyprus Cancer Research Institute is to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the biology of breast cancer through the identification of novel biomarkers following the precision medicine paradigm.
The project will create new and strengthen existing collaborations amongst the members of the CCRI organisations, enhancing the significance of multidisciplinary approaches in cancer research. New scientific knowledge, skills and expertise will be generated allowing for the expansion of the research organisations’ portfolio. Current clinical service will be largely benefited by the knowledge and experience exchange between bench and bedside.
Dr Anastasia Constantinidou graduated with a first class from the Medical School of the National and Kapodistrian University in Athens Greece (MD). She gained Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) in the UK and she subsequently completed her specialist clinical training in Internal Medicine and her specialist clinical training in Medical Oncology (CCT) at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London (2011). She gained an MSc in Oncology (Merit) from the University of London and she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship for laboratory research in Molecular Pathology for her four-year full time PhD studies at the Institute of Cancer Research, University of London.
She has been awarded a number of fellowships throughout her career including the Hellenic Society of Medical Oncology Clinical Training Fellowship and the ECCO-AACR-EORTC-ESMO Fellowship in Methods in Clinical Cancer Research Workshop as well as grants from the Wellcome Trust UK, the Sarcoma UK, the Research and Innovation Foundation (RIF Cyprus), the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework European Programme. She was the recipient of the 2020 Young Investigator Award in Life Sciences by the RIF.
Through competitive selection, she has presented her work in many international conferences including the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and the Connective Tissue Oncology Society (CTOS) annual conferences for over a decade. She has authored publications in high impact factor peer-reviewed journals including the Lancet Oncology, the Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, the Annals of Oncology, the European Journal of Cancer, the British Journal of Cancer and Pharmacology & Therapeutics.
She serves as a reviewer and an editorial board member in oncology and medical journals. She has been an invited speaker and chair on topics related to her research and clinical work nationally (UK, Cyprus) and internationally. She has served as an invited organizing committee member in the 2019 annual ESMO Asia and the 2020 annual ESMO conferences. She has been a Faculty member of the European School of Oncology (Southern Europe and Arab Countries) Meeting for oncology trainees and junior oncologists, since 2017 and she serves as the local chair in 2021.
Dr Constantinidou is the coordinator of the first postgraduate programme of the Medical School of the UCY, entitled Precision Medicine in Clinical Practice, which will enrol its first students in September 2021. She is a member of the National (Cyprus) Bioethics Committee and the National (Cyprus) Committee for Laboratory Animal Welfare since 2018. She is the coordinator of the Bank of Cyprus Oncology Centre team serving as a National Affiliated Centre of the European Reference Network EURACAN Rare Adult Solid Cancers. She also serves as the Secretary of the Cyprus Oncology Society since 2019 and the Representative of Cyprus in the ESMO National Societies Committee.
Georgia Charalambous earned a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry in 2018 and a Master of Science in 2021 from the Free University of Berlin. Her bachelor’s thesis was completed at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, where sheI focused on Macromolecular Structure and Interaction in AG Heinemann. For her master’s thesis, she interned at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in the Experimental Neuroimmunology group under Dr. rer. nat. Sarah-Christin Staroßom, working on single-cell sequencing. In 2022, she joined the ITL group at CCRI, focusing on CRISPR-Cas9 genome-wide screens in myelogenous leukemia cell lines to explore potential vulnerabilities and identify new therapeutic targets.
The preliminary results of the “Precision Medicine in Breast Cancer: Biomarker Identification” project were presented in the recent 1st Cyprus Oncology Congress held in Nicosia 6-8 February 2025.
In the context of this project, 100 breast cancer cases have been analyzed in relation to the expression of MDK. Promising results suggest that MDK can help identify early response or resistance to therapy in metastatic breast cancer.
The project aspires to analyze more cases with both early and metastatic breast cancer to fully define the prognostic and predictive role of this biomarker.
More details can be found in the e-poster as presented in the congress.
Click here for the MDK Poster
“Precision Medicine in Breast Cancer: Biomarker Identification” is the first Research and Innovation Foundation (RIF)-funded project in CCRI, initiated in July 2022 and led by Dr. Anastasia Constantinidou, the Group Leader of the Translational Research and Precision Medicine Institutional Team at CCRI.
