Cory Abate-Shen

Biosketch

Cory Abate-Shen, PhD is the Robert Sonneborn Professor of Medicine and Professor of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Urology, and Systems Biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physician and Surgeons. She earned her BA in Psychology from Fordham University, and her PhD in Neurobiology from Cornell University Medical College. She pursued postdoctoral studies of transcriptional regulation and cancer biology at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology. In 1991, she joined the faculty at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (now Rutgers Medical School), and in 2007 moved to her current position at Columbia University. At Columbia, she has served as Associate Director and Interim Director of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Chair of the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics. Current and previous leadership roles include the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Cancer Institute, the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research, and the Scientific Advisory Board of Breakthrough Cancer. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Honors include the Sinsheimer Scholar Award, Basil O’Connor Research Scholar, NSF Young Investigator Award, American Cancer Society Research Professorship, and the American Association for Cancer Research-Women in Cancer Research Charlotte Friend Award.

Research Interests

Cory Abate-Shen has a long-standing interest in understanding how processes underlying normal development go awry in cancer. Her discovery that Nkx3.1 is a prostate-specific homeobox gene led to the finding that NKX3.1 is sufficient to specify prostate in vivo, one of the few cases in which a single gene can re-program an otherwise fully differentiated tissue. Analyses of mutant mice showed the role of NKX3.1 loss in prostate cancer initiation and resulted in genetically engineered mouse models (GEMMs) that represent a broad spectrum of prostate cancer phenotypes. These models led to the identification of lineage plasticity as a key mechanism of drug resistance in neuroendocrine prostate cancer, and elucidation of new mechanisms of bone metastasis. She has generated genome-wide regulatory networks for mouse and human prostate cancer that have enabled cross-species computational analyses to identify master regulators of disease progression and metastasis. In addition to her work in prostate cancer, her laboratory has developed a toolkit to target the bladder urothelium in vivo, resulting in GEMMs that have informed on the cell of origin of bladder cancer and functional roles of key tumor suppressors for disease progression. Notably, analyses of these GEMMs have informed clinical practice through co-clinical analyses of combination chemotherapy which has proven beneficial for patients with high-risk non-muscle invasive bladder cancer.