Prof. Nancy Hynes Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland

Dr. Hynes completed a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in the Dept of Biochemistry. Afterwards she did post-doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany and the Swiss Cancer Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland. Before taking her current position at the FMI in Basel, she held positions at... read morethe Research Institute in Karlsruhe, Germany, and at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Bern, Switzerland. Dr. Hynes has been interested in understanding the molecules responsible for breast cancer development for many years. She initiated studies on mouse mammary tumor virus (MMTV) during her post-doctoral time, initially studying its transcriptional control by steroid hormones, followed by work on MMTV-induced mammary cancer. At the Ludwig Institute in Bern she started to work with human breast cancer material, initially asking questions about oncogenes that might be altered in primary breast tumors. This led to the discovery that the gene encoding the ErbB2 receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) was amplified and overexpressed in approximately 25% of primary tumors. Her lab has continued to study this receptor as well as other ERBB RTK family members. The lab has worked on various aspects of ERBB signaling in cancer cells and has examined how targeted therapeutics, including the monoclonal antibody Trastuzumab and various tyrosine kinase inhibitors, affect tumor biology. The lab has also been interested in finding novel methods to target the receptor in cancer cells and have examined effector proteins downstream of ERBB RTKs.