About Sherry Yang, MD, Ph.D
Dr. Sherry Yang’s research is focused on translational research aimed at reducing cancer recurrence and death, particularly in breast cancer. It has overtaken lung cancer as the most diagnosed cancer, with an estimated 2.3 million new cases (11.7%) among 36 cancers in 185 countries. Breast cancer is the leading cancer diagnosis and the second highest cause of cancer mortality in women, largely in the context of stage IV disease. Thus, it is critical to identify risk and prognostic factors to reduce death and improve survival in patients with metastatic disease. Dr. Yang’s team recently identified that locoregional tumor burden is a significant risk factor for mortality in de novo metastatic breast cancer. The finding is a result of, over two decades, implementing the precision medicine approach of identification and validation of predictive and prognosis factors. Focused on the biomarker-driven cancer treatment, she has been an editor of Handbook of Therapeutic Biomarkers in Cancer since 2010. Her team evaluated several biomarkers that are associated with chemotherapy outcomes in large cohort studies. They made the seminal observation that breast cancer subtypes per se may not have prognostic value in patients who did not receive any treatment; It was the treatment that had elicited the differential clinical outcomes intrinsically possessed by distinct molecular subtypes. Her group is the first to report that performance of independent clinical and molecular factors is weighted by treatment modality and nature of clinical end points.
Recent Comments
The findings are important to reduce cancer death.