Gerald Denis

Gerald Denis is Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Medicine and Co-Director of BU-BMC Cancer Center. He is a molecular oncologist with experience in chromatin control of transcription in cancer. He pioneered studies of the BET bromodomains proteins, a family comprised of BRD2 (originally named RING3), BRD3 and BRD4 in somatic cells, which are important as transcriptional co-regulators. Gerald Denis was the first to report a function for a BET protein, and to link these co-regulators to human cancer. The BET protein field has grown from sixteen papers, when he first published his work, to over 1,300 to date; they have since been implicated in several cancer types. Their recent data have established that BET bromodomain proteins provide a functional link between abnormal metabolism, inflammation and breast cancer progression in post-menopausal African American women. They are now realizing that BET proteins regulate cytokine/chemokine production in the immune cells that infiltrate the breast cancer microenvironment, which is important for immune exhaustion, chemoresistance, and metastasis.

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