Dr. Olopade was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship and is a leading expert in personalized risk assessment for breast cancer.

Dr. Olopade was born in Nigeria and earned her M.D. from the University of Ibadan in 1980. She continued her medical training in Lagos, at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and at the University of Chicago. She has been on the faculty at the University of Chicago since 1991. A year later, she started the Cancer Risk Center there, which focuses on preventative care for breast cancer (identifying women at higher risk for breast cancer and screening them), and on quality-of-life issues that particularly impact young women diagnosed with breast cancer (e.g., fertility).

Much of Dr. Olopade’s research focuses on two genes called BRCA1 and BRCA2. Every time DNA is replicated and cells divide, some of the DNA gets damaged. BRCA1 and BRCA2 are both involved in the healthy process of repairing that damage, making sure that the DNA gets put back together in the right way. (If it’s repaired incorrectly, it can cause big changes in the DNA that eventually lead to cancer.) These two genes were identified in the early 1990s by studying large Jewish families in which an unusually large number of the female family members developed breast cancer, which led researchers to suspect that this high suspecibility must be inherited. They found that all of these women had inherited one defective version of BRCA1 and/or BRCA2 — thus, from the time they were born, every cell in their body only had one working copy of the gene left. Then, at some later point, a cell in their breast tissue had lost its other copy of BRCA1 (or BRCA2), and that cell had gone on to form a tumor.

Although fewer than 10% of people have BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations, a woman who does have one of these mutation has ~80% chance of developing breast cancer during her lifetime. Therefore, genetic testing for mutations in these two genes can help doctors identify high-risk patients for more careful monitoring (e.g., earlier mammograms or preventative mastectomy).

BRCA1 and BRCA2 were identified in Ashkenazi Jewish women because their frequency is higher in that population. Dr. Olopade was the first person to show that BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations are also common in African-American women. Importantly, these are different mutations even though they occur in the same genes. BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that are common in African-Americans are associated with particularly early onset of breast cancer, much more aggressive and drug-resistant cancer, and cancer that originates from a different part of the breast tissue. Additionally, Dr. Olopade found that the cause of BRCA-related cancers was different: African-American women were more likely to lose both copies of functional BRCA during their lifetimes, rather than inheriting one faulty copy and subsequently losing the second. This suggests that there is a gene/environment interaction that affects African-American women differently.