Share Translational Research Program

The overarching goal of the Translational Research Program is to discover and translate molecular and epidemiological findings to:

• The laboratory: for advancing our understanding of the biological basis for various exposure-disease relationships
  
• The clinic: for improved risk assessment, early disease detection, prognostication, treatment decision making and survivorship

As part of this we strive to help the implementation of personalized medicine or the tailoring of specialized and individualized treatment to the specific characteristics of the disease. In practice this means using molecular profiles of tissue or blood samples to accurately predict a person's susceptibility of developing disease, the presence of disease, disease prognosis and its response to different treatments.

Current Research Interests

• Cancer Early Detection: On-going work aims to discover and validate novel early detection biomarkers for multiple cancers including breast, colorectal, ovary, and pancreas cancers.
• Risk Assessment and Exposure Assessment: Current efforts include the discovery and validation of transcriptomic and genomic predictors of cancer progression and survival, and the effects of diet and lifestyle on biomarkers of cancer susceptibility using controlled intervention studies.
• Tumor Biology: Faculty use multiple approaches to advance our understanding of cancer pathogenesis and progression including through the utilization of mouse models, cell cultures, and mitochondrial DNA.
• Technology Development: Several novel technologies have been developed by program faculty to advance translational cancer research including the development of bead-based ELISA assays; the Random Mutation Capture (RMC) assay to quantify mutations in any DNA based organism; high density antibody arrays for high throughput proteomic, glycomic and autoantibody biomarker discovery; technology for interrogating the metabolome; and high-throughput sequencing approaches to characterize the gut microbial community.