Group 2B: Lobular Breast Cancer



Wednesday, June 14
2:00 pm – 3:30 pm Eastern Time (US/New York)



Mentor: Julia Levine

Julia is a metastatic lobular breast cancer thriver. She is a founding Steering Committee Member of the Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance (LBCA) since its inception in 2016. Her roles are Research and Publications Curator, Metastatic Lead Advocate, and Patient & Research Advocate. She is the metastatic liaison between LBCA and the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project, Living Beyond Breast Cancer, and BreastCancerTrials.org.

She is a member of the Cancer Support Community-L.A. and a peer mentor in the stage 3/4 breast cancer support group since 2013 to the present. She has also been involved as an advocate with Metavivor and GRASP. She has attended the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, Theresa’s Research Foundation MBC Research Conference, Harvard Medical School conferences, and is on the planning committee for the International Invasive Lobular Cancer (ILC) Symposium at University of Pittsburgh.

She participates in research advocacy to advance her knowledge, educate others, and to provide a patient perspective in the development and implementation of studies in both metastatic and lobular breast cancer.

Twitter: @jackel626

Scientist: Steffi Oesterreich, Ph.D.

Dr Oesterreich’s area of interest is endocrine resistance and metastatic disease in breast cancer. Her lab studies mutations and epigenetic changes that lead to resistance to commonly used hormonal therapies such as Tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors. One focus area is the understanding of invasive lobular cancer, an understudied histological breast cancer subtype that affects 26,000-39,000 patients per year in the US alone. To reach the goal of translating findings into the clinic, she works in transdisciplinary teams, including medical oncologists, surgeons, biostatisticians, bioinformaticians, and pathologists. All of these studies include many aspects of translational breast cancer research utilizing basic biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, cell lines, rodent models, and clinical samples from retrospective cohort studies and from clinical trials.

Twitter: @oesterreichs