Utthara Nayar is a cancer researcher based in Boston, Massachusetts.^[1] Her work focuses specifically on breast cancer.^[2]

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Nayar lived in the country of Oman during her childhood.^[2] She was encouraged to participate in science, with her passion being in biology and physics.^[2]

For her undergraduate degree Nayar attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a part of their biology Honors Program with a major in biology.^[2] She earned her doctorate through Weill Cornell Medical College.^[1] She is employed at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a researcher in the lab of Nikhil Wagle.^[2][3] She is also a member of a team at Harvard Medical School as a research affiliate.^[4]

At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Nayar and her team have been investigating metastatic breast cancer and how hormones affect patient treatment.^[2] For some forms of breast cancer a patient is ER positive, or estrogen receptor positive, meaning that tumors grow as the levels of estrogen in the body increase.^[2] For this type of breast cancer, patients quickly become resistant to the treatment methods available and their bodies stop responding to any medical help they receive, seemingly without any connection.^[3][4] However, Nayar and her team found a link in patients who became resistant to ER positive treatment- many had HER-2 gene mutations.^[3] This possible discovery has spurred on a five-year phase 2 trial by Nayar and her team, investigating the connection between ER positive treatment rejection and the HER-2 gene.^[5]

In 2012 while at Cornell, Nayar was awarded the AACR-Aflac, Inc. Scholar-in-Training Award.^[1]

In 2018 while working at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Nayar was awarded the 2018 Women In Cancer Research Scholar Award by the American Association for Cancer Research for her work with breast cancer.^[8]