Today we meet the last of our William Raveis Charitable Fund Fellowship Recipient’s, Dr. Adrienne Boire, a clinical investigator and PhD at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Dr. Boire studies leptomeningeal metastasis, or spread of cancer cells into the spinal fluid, is a devastating complication of cancer resulting in rapid neurologic disability and death. With little mechanistic information to guide treatment decisions, efforts at treatment are too often futile. To address this critical knowledge gap, Dr. Boire will employ a translational approach to analyze patient samples utilizing multiple, complementary, orthogonal molecular strategies as tools for discovery. This approach will be coupled with hypothesis-driven mouse models to assemble coherent molecular mechanisms that describe cancer cell interactions with their microenvironment. This mechanistic work will suggest new targets for therapeutic intervention, paving the way for novel treatment approaches.

Dr. Boire was raised in Minnesota where she attended Macalester College, earning an undergraduate degree in biology. She later earned a PhD in biochemistry from Tufts University and her MD from the University of Chicago. Dr. Boire’s patients inspire her to see the beauty in everyday life.  She and her family make time to visit the many museums near their home in New York.  She is particularly fascinated by still life: art that elevates the everyday into the extraordinary. For her, art demands that we stop, consider and appreciate the luminous and evanescent spectacle of everyday life unfolding around us.