Elisa Rush Port


Elisa Rush Port FACS is Associate Professor of Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, as well as cofounder and director of the Dubin Breast Center at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai Health System, since 2010. She has received four research grants, has served as an investigator or co-investigator on 15 clinical trials, published 44 peer-reviewed articles, and published a total of 12 book chapters and books. She has specialized in sentinel-node biopsy, a diagnostic method that determines cancer stages based on spread to regional lymph nodes, nipple sparing mastectomy, and the use of MRI for breast cancer.

Biography

Port was born in New York City and grew up in San Diego, majored in French and Spanish at Dartmouth College, received her MD at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, performed an internship at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, general surgery residencies at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Long Island Jewish Medical Center, and a research fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she was a staff breast cancer surgeon from 1999 to 2010. In 2010 she co-founded the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai.
She is among a group of surgical oncologists like Laura J. Esserman, who challenges the one-size-fits-all approach to treatment. In a 2015 New York Times profile, Esserman's approach to screening and when and how it should be applied to those at risk for breast cancer was framed as being slow to receive acceptance in the medical community. Esserman is not without supporters and researchers like Port, who was quoted in the same article: "Laura is one of the people who's actively engaged in research in this area and will help us push the field forward to determine whether or not there is a group of people for whom surveillance will be appropriate."
This approach to diagnostics and treatment is highlighted in Port's The New Generation Breast Cancer Book.
Port is frequently sourced in media, including NPR, The New York Times, television news networks, and digital and print magazines.
She is married to Jeffrey L. Port, a thoracic surgeon at Weill Cornell Medicine/NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital. They have two children.

Research

Port has published a large body of work on sentinel-node diagnostics, used to determine a patient's cancer stage, and researched PET scanning for pre-operative assessment of breast cancer. She conducted a Phase I study, in collaboration with Andrew Jess Dannenberg and Clifford Hudis at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, on the inhibition of the enzymes COX-2 and aromatase in breast cancer and mechanisms of its drug resistance.
Port's current research work involves a collaboration with Hanna Irie on triple negative breast cancer. Their work is aimed at better understanding and treatments of triple negative breast cancer and mechanisms of its drug resistance.
Other recent work addresses the benefits of screening mammography. With collaborators, the work has shown that patients who undergo mammograms are less likely to require more aggressive surgical or medical treatments as a result of early detection.
She has been a vocal critic of the current United States Preventive Services Task Force guideline that now classifies mammograms as optional for women between 40 and 49 years of age. According to Julie Margenthaler, a breast surgeon with the Washington University School of Medicine and Chair of the ASBrS Communication Committee, the controversy appears to be a result of conflicting data from studies, as well as a focus on incidence rates, possibly without placing equal value on the stage of a patient's cancer when first diagnosed. Regarding this debate, Port co-authored a New York Times op-ed titled "Why the Annual Mammogram Matters".
Port's funding has come in part from the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, a Breast Cancer Alliance Exceptional Project Grant, and the National Institutes of Health.

Professional affiliations

Articles

Partial list of peer-reviewed articles:
Partial list: