V. Craig Jordan
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
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Primary Section: 41, Medical Genetics, Hematology, and Oncology Secondary Section: 42, Medical Physiology and Metabolism Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2009)
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Research Interests
I am a pharmacologist with a specific interest in the discovery, the mechanism of action and development of antiestrogenic medicines to treat and prevent breast cancer. ICI46474 (tamoxifen) was unsuccessfully developed as a postcoital contraceptive. However my laboratory subsequently created the scientific principles for targeting the tumor estrogen receptor with long-term adjuvant therapy that enhanced patient survivorship. Similarly, my laboratory completed the first experiments to create a foundation for tamoxifen's use as a preventive for breast cancer in high risk women. I found that the related compound now called raloxifene preserved bone density in estrogen deprived animals, but prevented mammary cancer at the same time. Unlike tamoxifen, that caused the growth of endometrial cancer in our laboratory models, raloxifene did not. Today raloxifene is used to prevent osteoporosis and breast cancer, without increasing the risk of endometrial cancer. These data formed the basis of our description of the new drug group Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMS). For two decades, my laboratory has documented the evolution and mechanisms of antihormone drug resistance in breast cancer, and recently described the mechanism for the paradoxical observation that estrogen can cause apoptosis in appropriately vulnerable breast cancers.
