Cancer Control

In response to treatment, cancer cells can react in complex, difficult to predict ways. Here we consider this through a lens of treatment-induced driving forces pushing cancer cells around an epigenetic landscape. This force may cause new phenotypes to emerge, old phenotypes to disapear, and/or the balance between pre-existing phenotypes to shift. The overall goal of this project is to identify treatments that can epigenetically reprogram drug-resistant cancer cells toward drug-sensitive states.

• Identify regulatory and epigenetic factors stabilizing drug-resistant or quiescent phenotypes
• Identify treatments that can target those key regulators to de-stabilize undesirable states
• Validate drug combinations in which one agent reprograms cells toward the sensitive state, and the other agent kills cells in sensitive state

To achieve these ends, we employ a mixture of bioinformatic analyses and mechanistic modeling.