StewartSheila Washington School of Medicine in St. LouisUnited States

Biographical Sketch Dr. Sheila A Stewart, Ph.D. Dr. Stewart is a Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology and Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and is the Associate Director for Basic Science at the Siteman Cancer Center. She received her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from UCLA in 1997, and completed her postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Biology at the Whitehead Institute at MIT in Robert Weinberg’s laboratory. Dr. Stewart is an American Cancer Society Scholar and research is focused on understanding how age-related changes in the tumor microenvironment impact tumorigenesis. Her laboratory has shown that aged stromal cells, similar to cancer associated fibroblasts express a plethora of pro-tumorigenic factors, many of which are subject to post-transcriptional stabilization. This work led to the identification to the p38MAPK-MK2 pathway where Dr. Stewart and colleagues are targeting MK2 in a metastatic breast cancer trial. Dr. Stewart’s team is also using this knowledge to combine MK2 inhibition with immune therapy approaches to reduce metastatic breast cancer progression. Finally, the laboratory is also examining how age-related changes in the premetastatic niche facilitate tumor cell seeding and outgrowth and how these changes alter the local immune response to facilitate tumor cell proliferation and impact tumor cell dormancy.