Ritu Aneja

Ritu Aneja, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Clinical and Diagnostic Sciences and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the School of Health Professions. She is a basic and translational scientist who conducts a broad spectrum of research in the areas of breast cancer health disparities, diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive biomarkers, and novel chemopreventive and chemotherapeutic strategies, using integrative multi-omic and machine-learning based approaches. Her lab is investigating the socio-biological mechanisms of breast cancer disparities and has been continuously funded since 2007 through K99/R00, U01, R01, R03, and STTR grants from the NIH, as well as other agencies such as the DoD and non-profit foundations, for cancer and racial disparities research. The breadth of her research experiences is well suited for the diverse nature of the CPCTP.

The goal of her research is to understand why survival and treatment outcomes differ between White and Black women, with a focus on triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive subtype that disproportionately affects Black women. Her convergence research has led her to assemble teams of researchers and clinicians from multiple life science, clinical science, and social science disciplines to collaboratively address complex medical challenges that are deeply entwined with social structures and existing health inequalities. In this context, Dr. Aneja recognized the imperative need for a global approach to address cancer disparities and founded the International Consortium for Advancing Research on Triple Negative Breast Cancer (ICART) in 2016. ICART is a global platform of research groups from 10 countries across four continents, with the mission of aggregating complementary expertise and resources globally, to advance knowledge on TNBC and reduce breast cancer-related disparities. Today, ICART includes more than 30 hospitals and institutions, including a network of 15 teaching hospitals across Nigeria and Ghana and has so far enabled 9 multi-institutional studies and trained 15 graduate students and 8 junior investigators across the globe, resulting in more than 30 publications.