Moon Chen
University of California-Davis, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Cancer does not fall evenly across populations: stomach cancer hits Latino communities and other communities of color disproportionately, and lung cancer carries a heavy burden among Latina and Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women. Yet the laboratory tumor models used to test new drugs rarely come from these patients, so it is unclear whether candidate treatments will work for them.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
cancer health disparities
patient-derived xenograft
PDXNet
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Administer internal pilot projects within the University of California-UT Southwestern Diversity Patient-Derived Xenograft Development and Trial Center, focused on gastric and lung tumor models from Latino, African American, and Asian American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander patients.
- Develop and evaluate pilot studies that span the national PDXNet consortium, coordinating with the National Cancer Institute and the PDXNet Data Commons and Coordinating Center.
- Engage investigators outside the PDXNet network through funded projects and share patient-derived xenograft technologies with them.
- Coordinate standard operating procedures and methods for experimental validation and reproducibility so PDX results can be compared across the six participating cancer centers.
More about the research
This work supports a multi-center effort to build and test patient-derived xenografts, or PDXs - tumor samples from real patients grown in mice so that drugs can be tried on them before clinical trials - drawn specifically from minority cancer patients in California and Texas.
Why it matters
Drugs are often tested on tumor models that do not represent the patients who carry the heaviest cancer burden. By expanding a repository of stomach and lung tumor models taken from Latino, African American, and Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander patients, and by coordinating shared procedures and pilot studies across cancer centers, this work could help identify therapies that work for groups with worse cancer outcomes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lenora Loo
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify lifestyle, sociodemographic and clinical predictors of DCIS (stage 0 breast cancer) progressing to invasive cancer in AANHPI women, using exposure data from the Multiethnic Cohort and Hawaii Tumor Registry.
Jennifer Koblinski
Virginia Commonwealth University, VA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop more than 500 new patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models, patient tumors grown in mice, from the patient populations served by the cancer center.
Sora Tanjasiri
University of California-Irvine, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify and describe the cancer burden across Orange County's diverse populations through cancer monitoring, as part of the UC Irvine cancer center's Community Outreach and Engagement program.
The school
University of California-Davis: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 647 research doctorates a year.
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