Carlos L. Arteaga is the Associate Director for Clinical Research, director of the Center for Cancer Targeted Therapies, and professor of Cancer Biology and Medicine at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.[1] In 2014–2015, he was the president of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Arteaga graduated with his MD from the Universidad de Guayaquil in Ecuador in 1980, where his father was the dean of medicine.[2] He came to the United States intending to specialize in cardiology after his internal medicine residency at Emory University, but changed course and instead did a fellowship in hematology-oncology at University of Texas Health Science Center.
Arteaga joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 1989 and since 2002, has directed the NCI-funded Vanderbilt Breast Cancer Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE).
Arteaga is recognized as an expert in the field of breast cancer research. He has demonstrated the utility of targeting TGF-β, which causes cancer to spread, metastasize, and become resistant to chemotherapeutic drugs.[3] He was involved in the development of trastuzumab in combination with chemotherapy for patients with HER2-mutated cancer.[4] Among his current research areas is triple-negative breast cancer, for which there are no targeted therapy options.[5]
He is a principal investigator for the Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) "Targeting the PI3K Pathway in Women's Cancers" Dream Team, which provides $15 million is research funding for a research team spread across 7 institutions.[6]