Sarah Cooley, M.D.

Sarah Cooley, M.D., first worked with Jeffrey Miller, M.D., when she was a University of Minnesota medical student. Now as an assistant professor of medicine at the University and a clinical research scholar with Miller as her mentor, she represents the newest generation of researchers making discoveries at the Cancer Center.

In her research, Cooley is taking an innovative approach to treating breast cancer, which is a solid tumor cancer. She is applying a cell-based therapy that has previously been used primarily in patients with hematological malignancies (blood cancers). This approach builds on both Miller's work on hematological malignancies and studies that Cooley completed during her time in Miller's laboratory as a student. That early work demonstrated that breast cancer cells grown in culture dishes were very susceptible to a process where cells called "natural killer (NK)" cells attach and destroy cancer cells, and therefore might be good targets for NK cell-based therapy. NK cells are white blood cells in the immune system that target and kill infected and malignant cells.

Cooley recently began the first phase II clinical trial at the University to use NK cells to target a solid tumor. In this trial, patients with advanced breast cancer receive an infusion of NK cells from a family member in combination with chemotherapy. The trial seeks to understand how the infused NK cells expand and target breast tumors, and if NK cell-based therapy can result in longer progression-free survival.

"We're working on getting the same rates of NK cell expansion with solid tumors as is seen in blood cancer," Cooley says. "Because solid tumors are different from blood cancers, we are still at the point of trying to perfect the ability of NK cells to grow and expand in the patients."