OUR RESEARCH
Improving outcomes for people living with advanced cancer will require developing clinical tools to optimize therapeutic decision-making for individual patients, understanding mechanisms of treatment resistance, and discovering the next generation of effective anti-cancer drugs. Progress towards these goals has been impeded by the intractable challenges of obtaining tumor tissue specimens. Liquid biopsies – studying tumor DNA circulating in the bloodstream – present an unprecedented opportunity to interrogate an individual patient’s tumor molecular features in real-time, and longitudinally across their disease course. Further, the minimally-invasive nature of a blood draw compared to a tumor biopsy, allows for sample collection and analysis at unprecedented scale. We believe that liquid biopsy technologies are poised to revolutionize cancer research, propelling unprecedented scientific breakthroughs, and transforming patient care into a new era of precision and hope.
Our lab has made several contributions to advancing the field of liquid biopsy, including pioneering novel methods to profile epigenomic features in cell-free (cf)DNA (Nature Medicine, 2020), demonstrating the power of epigenomic liquid biopsies for non-invasive cancer detection (Genetics in Medicine, 2020), establishing the ability of liquid biopsies to deliver precision medicine for patients with advanced cancer (Annals of Oncology, 2022), developing epigenomic cfDNA-based diagnostic tests to detect clinically actionable mechanisms of therapeutic resistance (Clinical Cancer Research, 2022), and highlighting the power of integrated multiomic cfDNA profiling to maximize insights into tumor biology (Clinical Cancer Research, 2024).
Building upon this work, we are deploying a rapidly evolving suite of liquid biopsy tools to generate predictive biomarkers to determine in real-time which treatments will be most, and least, likely to benefit individual patients, understand mechanisms of treatment resistance, and nominate novel therapeutic strategies for patients with advanced cancer.
AREAS OF FOCUS
Predictive Biomarkers
Choosing the right treatment for the right patient at the right time
Treatment Resistance
Studying mechanisms of primary and acquired drug resistance
Tumor Subtypes
Identifying clincally actionable tumor molecular subtypes
Drug Development
Nominating and testing novel therapeutic strategies
APPROACHES
Patient Samples
Blood and tissue collection from patients in the clinic
Clinical Annotation
Collection of detailed treatment and clinical outcomes data
Liquid Biopsy
Multi-omic profiling of circulating tumor DNA in the bloodstream
Bioinformatics
Integrated computational analysis of cell-free DNA sequencing data