Professor Harikrishna Nakshatri

Professor Harikrishna Nakshatri

Professor of Surgery, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, USA

Harikrishna Nakshatri, B.V.Sc., Ph.D., is the Marian J. Morrison Chair of Breast Cancer Research and Professor of Surgery, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He is also the Associate Director for Education at the Indiana University Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center. He serves as a Research Career Scientist at the VA Roudebush Medical center. In addition, he is the Chief Scientific Officer of the Susan G. Komen Tissue Bank. He served as a Susan G. Komen Scholar 2010-2020 and was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) in 2021.

Dr. Nakshatri studies the molecular drivers of therapy resistance in breast cancer. His laboratory was the first to identify the role of the protein complex, NF-kappaB, which controls genes that respond to environmental stress and infection, in triple negative breast cancer. He also identified biomarkers that may predict response to anti-estrogen therapy. Utilizing normal breast tissues of women of different ethnic/racial background, his group has discovered genetic ancestry-dependent heterogeneity in the normal breast, which has important implications on how tumors are characterized for genomic abnormalities. His recently published studies may enable to understand why hormone-responsive breast tumors are more common in women of European ancestry and why triple negative breast cancers are aggressive in women of African ancestry. Additionally, his group has mapped the normal breasts as well as the breasts of BRCA1/2 mutation careers at single cell resolution using single cell sequencing techniques. These efforts may lead to classification of breast cancer based on “cell-of-origin” of tumor. He is using systems biology approaches to understand organ specific breast cancer metastasis and developing patient-derived tumor models that reflect organ-specific metastasis and therapy resistance.

Updated 18 August 2023