Getting the right breast cancer therapy to the right patient
Over 1,300 women are still dying of breast cancer in Sweden every year. Theodoros Foukakis is trying to understand the tumour properties that determine the success of a particular treatment in order to achieve greater therapeutic precision. Meet one of the new professors of Karolinska Institutet who will participate in this year's installation ceremony at Aula Medica on 9 October.
Text: Karin Tideström, for KI’s installation ceremony booklet 2025
What are you researching?
“Every year, over 11,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in Sweden, and even though treatments have greatly improved, more than 1,300 of these cases prove fatal. The need for better and more precise therapies is therefore particularly pressing. In my clinical therapy studies, I’m trying to understand how different treatments affect the tumour and to identify what tumour properties determine how well they succeed.”
How are you going about this?
“We gather tumour tissue and blood samples from before and during a treatment and analyse them at a molecular level, looking, for example, at DNA, RNA and protein expression. If we analyse many different tumours, we’ll hopefully be able to identify patterns and biomarkers that can explain the variation in patient response to a particular therapy.”
What are your findings to date?
“We’ve made several findings that can be of use in the future. For instance, in patients with hormone-sensitive breast cancer, we’ve identified a pattern of three dozen or so genes that can divide the patients into two groups: those that require chemotherapy and those that benefit more from a combination of hormone therapy and targeted medicines.”
What’s the next step?
“Our next step is to turn these predictive biomarkers into a test that doctors can use to select the right treatment for a patient in advance. But for this to happen, we need to do more clinical studies showing that the test actually does improve therapeutic outcomes for these patients.”
About Theodoros Foukakis
Professor of Oncology at the Department of Oncology-Pathology
Theodoros Foukakis was born in 1978 on Crete, Greece. He took his medical degree in 2002 from the University of Crete, moving in that same year to Stockholm and Karolinska Institutet, where he earned a PhD with a thesis on thyroid cancer in 2005. Since then, he has divided his time between clinical work as an oncologist at Karolinska University Hospital and research at Karolinska Institutet. He was made Docent in 2014 and Senior Lecturer in 2020. Theodoros Foukakis was appointed Professor at Karolinska Institutet on 2 April 2025.