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Cancer Physiology Department Faculty
Primary Appointments
Robert J. Gillies, PhD
Focus: Gillies lab is primarily focused on the causes and consequences of heterogeneity of the tumor microenvironment
Themes: Causes and Consequences of Tumor Acidity; Quantitative imaging tumor habitats; capturing heterogeneity with Radiomics.
Gina DeNicola, PhD
Focus: The DeNicola lab uses genetically engineered mouse models and mass spec metabolomics to investigate the consequence of NRF2 deregulation in cancer.
Themes: cancer metabolism, redox biology, NRF2, KEAP1
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Patsy McDonald, PhD
Focus: Our lab is focused on investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation, trafficking, and activation of G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) involved in metabolic disorders and cancer, with the ultimate goal of translating knowledge gained from these studies into the design of therapeutically useful GPCR modulators.
Themes: GPCRs, Signal transduction, assay development, drug discovery
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Andriy Marusyk, PhD
Focus: Marusyk lab focuses on understanding development of therapy resistance from eco-evolutionary perspective, and using this knowledge to develop more effective therapeutic approaches.
Themes: therapy resistance, tumor microenvironment, integration of experimental & mathematical modeling.
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David L. Morse, PhD
Focus: The Morse Lab specializes in the development of cancer-targeted agents for delivery of imaging contrast and therapy. Projects begin with defining a specific clinical question to be addressed, followed by target discovery via expression profiling of patient specimens, targeting moiety discovery, and development and testing of ligand conjugates.
Themes: Cell-surface Targets, Targeted α-Particle Therapy, Fluorescence-Guided Surgery, Nuclear and Molecular Imaging.
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Natarajan Raghunand, PhD
Focus: The Raghunand Lab develops imaging biomarkers of disease progression and therapeutic response in cancer for translation and testing in prospective clinical trials.
Themes: Magnetic Resonance Imaging acquisition, reconstruction, analysis and contrast agent development.
Ariosto S. Silva, PhD
Focus: Dr. Silva's laboratory's ultimate goal is to improve the clinical outcome of hematologic malignancy patients through a novel personalized approach to therapy. We use a systems biology approach to combine drug sensitivity assays and molecular data (RNAseq and WES) from fresh bone marrow biopsies to assess optimum choice of therapy, as well as mechanisms of re-sensitization to standard of care regimens through the combination with targeted therapies (e.g. kinase inhibitors).
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Joint Appointments:
Jung W. Choi, MD, PhD
Focus: Dr. Choi is interested in applications of positron emission tomographic blood pool imaging to a number of different pathologies. He is also actively involved in radiomics projects in oncologic body imaging.
Themes: Radiomics in oncology, positron emission tomographic blood pool imaging
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Ghassan E. El-Haddad, MD
Focus: Dr. El-Haddad's research interests include development of novel targeted and minimally invasive image-guided cancer therapies.
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Kujtim Latifi, PhD
Focus: Dr. Latifi specializes in imaging applications for radiation oncology, in particular lung ventilation using 4DCT and quantitative imaging biomarkers (radiomics) to predict treatment outcomes for radiation therapy patients.
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Eduardo Moros, PhD
Focus: current research interests involve the application of medical physics, quantitative imaging (radiomics), mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence to develop and implement clinically Total Adaptive Radiation Therapy, which aims to account for both physical and biological patient changes to personalize radiation dose delivery. He is also leading efforts on radiation dosimetry of targeted alpha particle therapy for metastatic cancer.
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Nainesh Parikh, MD
Focus: Dr. Parikh is a clinical researcher actively involved in late stage clinical trials for prostate and kidney cancer. Specifically, he is evaluating the role of a novel interventional procedure, “prostatic artery embolization” for the purposes of improving urologic outcomes in patients with locally confined prostate cancer who receive radiation therapy. In addition, he is interested in evaluating novel technologies for the percutaneous therapy of locally confined kidney cancer.
Themes: Minimally invasive intervention, advanced image-guided therapy
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Jingsong Zhang, MD, PhD
Focus: As a clinical researcher, Dr. Zhang is actively involved in early phase clinical development of novel therapeutic agents for prostate and bladder cancers. As part of an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Robert Gatenby and Dr. Joel Brown, he applied the evolutionary game therapy model in the design and conducting of an adaptive therapy trials in metastatic prostate cancer.
Themes: adaptive therapy, DNA damage repair.
Geoffrey G. Zhang, PhD
Focus: My major research interests include quantitative image analysis, Monte Carlo radiotherapy treatment simulations and other clinical dosimetry for radiotherapy.
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