Jean J. Latimer, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women's Health. She is a member of the graduate faculty of the Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry Program and the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Her research laboratory is located at the Hillman Cancer Center. Dr. Latimer's laboratory specializes in DNA repair deficiency as a causative factor in breast carcinogenesis. A winner of a Department of Defense Innovative Research Award, Dr. Latimer’s laboratory has developed a multiple-lineage tissue engineering system for primary culture of Human Mammary Epithelial Cells (HMEC). There are three unique features of this system: it has a success rate of 100% at establishing primary cultures from reduction mammoplasties; it produces unusually long-lived cultures (three months or longer), and these cultures progressively undergo ductal, if not lobular, differentiation in vitro, effectively reiterating in vivo organogenesis. Dr. Latimer has also used this methodology to culture breast tumors as well as non-diseased tissue with a success rate of 85 percent. In these studies her laboratory measured DNA repair capacity as an etiological factor in breast tumorigenesis. She has shown that all early stage tumors show a significant loss of nucleotide excision repair (NER) compared to non-diseased breast reduction mammoplasty cultures.

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