April 4, 2013

VU’s Arteaga to lead American Association for Cancer Research

Carlos Arteaga, M.D., professor of Medicine and Cancer Biology at Vanderbilt, has been elected president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research for 2013-2014.

Carlos Arteaga, M.D.

Carlos Arteaga, M.D., professor of Medicine and Cancer Biology at Vanderbilt, has been elected president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research for 2013-2014.

Arteaga, who holds the Donna S. Hall Chair in Breast Cancer, also serves as associate director for Clinical Research and director of the Breast Cancer Research Program at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC).

Elected by the organization’s members, Arteaga will work with the AACR board of directors and the 34,000-plus membership to further the AACR’s mission to prevent and cure cancer through research, education, communication and collaboration.

He will officially become president-elect Tuesday, April 9, at the AACR Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., and will assume the presidency in April 2014.

“I am very grateful to the AACR and its members for this honor and opportunity,” said Arteaga. “I look forward to working with the association and meaningfully contributing to its leadership role and progress in the fight against cancer in these difficult but also exciting times.”

“This incredible honor is testament to the impact of Dr. Arteaga’s research and leadership on the cancer research community worldwide,” said Jennifer Pietenpol, Ph.D., director of VICC.
“Through his work at Vanderbilt-Ingram, his contributions to numerous national committees and his leadership, Carlos stimulates impactful research and collaboration that is changing the face of oncology.”

Arteaga’s involvement in the AACR spans more than a decade. He has served as a member of the board of directors, chair of the AACR Special Conferences Committee, member of the Annual Meeting Program Committee, co-chairperson of several special research conferences and as an editorial board member of the AACR journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.

Arteaga was also an editorial board member of Clinical Cancer Research from 2001 to 2004 and is currently deputy editor. Since 2008, he has served on behalf of the AACR as co-chair of the annual CTRC–AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium and is a principal investigator on the Stand Up To Cancer Dream Team, “Targeting the PI3K Pathways in Women’s Cancers.”

His research interests include oncogene signaling and molecular therapeutics in breast cancer with an emphasis on targeted therapies, mechanisms of drug resistance, translational research and investigator-initiated clinical trials.

Early in his career, Arteaga was the first to report the role of IGF-I receptors and TGF beta on breast cancer progression and their potential as therapeutic targets.
More recent work has focused on the role of pre-surgical and neoadjuvant trials to discover molecular biomarkers that inform patient selection in clinical trials and mechanisms of drug resistance in breast cancer.

He showed the role of aberrant activation of the PI3K pathway in promoting escape from anti-estrogens and the ability of inhibitors of HER2 and PI3K to reverse resistance to anti-estrogen therapy in human breast cancer.

Arteaga has received many honors and awards, including the AACR-Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award, the American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor Award, the Gianni Bonadonna Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction from the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation and, early in his career, the Clinical Investigator Award from the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.

He is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians and the American Society for Clinical Investigation.

Arteaga received his medical degree in 1980 from the Facultad de Ciencias Médicas at the Universidad de Guayaquil in Ecuador.

Following an internal medicine residency at Emory University in Atlanta, Arteaga completed a fellowship in medical oncology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
He joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University in 1989.