Relda Marie Cailleau

[2] He settled in San Francisco and established a successful men’s clothing store in 1877 at the corner of Geary and Grant Avenue.

Her mother, Rose Relda Adler Cailleau (d.1936), was a well-known soprano opera singer who debuted at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1899 and toured throughout Europe.

She later earned a Master's degree in biochemistry at Berkeley working in the laboratory of Charles Atwood Kofoid who was known for his studies of marine protozoans and the effects of parasites on human health.

[6] Cailleau later pursued graduate work in France at the Institut Pasteur at the University of Paris, receiving her doctorate in 1937 under the tutelage of the Nobel Prize winner Andre Lwoff.

At this time, Cailleau joined a small group of pioneers studying methods to establish cell lines from human tissue.

Nelson-Rees subsequently published a series of papers in major scientific journals  pleading for more stringent methods to establish the true identity of cultured cell lines.

She then relocated to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, with her collaborator William John Reeves Jr, who had worked under her tutelage as a post doctoral fellow at UCSF.

Several of these lines have proved to be crucial for development of anticancer drugs and for an understanding of the genesis of breast cancer.

This line has proved crucial for the discovery of EGFR related therapies such as antibodies like Cetuximab and kinase inhibitors such as Gefitinib currently used in treatment of breast and lung cancer.

The MDA-MB-453 cell line is androgen receptor-positive and `triple-negative' for estrogen receptor-α, progesterone receptor and the Her-2/neu protein expression.