Joshua Campbell
Boston University, MA·Genetics
African American men have the highest rates of prostate cancer and prostate cancer death in the United States. The team has shown that African American men with low-risk prostate cancer have twice the risk of death of men from other racial groups.
- Fields
Genetics
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
prostate cancer
cancer health disparities
African American men
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Identify genetic alterations linked to tumor grade by whole exome sequencing of archived prostate cancers from 300 African American and 200 European American men from Boston Medical Center and UCSF.
- Characterize gene activity and protein profiles of prostate epithelial cell populations in organoids from African American and European American men, using single-cell RNA sequencing and mass spectrometry.
- Develop new prostate cell models from African American patients with conditional reprogramming, then use CRISPR/Cas9 editing of ancestry- and grade-linked driver genes to test whether their effects depend on ancestral background.
More about the research
The causes are many. This project tests one possibility: that low-risk tumors in African American men carry distinct genetic changes that make them more aggressive. Studying this has been hard because few laboratory cell models come from men of different ancestries.
Why it matters
Identifying the genetic changes that make prostate cancer more aggressive in African American men could eventually improve their treatment and help reduce cancer health disparities. The new collection of prostate cell models from African American patients would also give other scientists tools to study these disparities.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shailesh Singh
Morehouse School of Medicine, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Establish whether signaling between the CCR6 receptor and its chemokine partner CCL20 is associated with non-small cell lung cancer aggressiveness and therapeutic response in African American and European American patients.
Nina Steele
University of Cincinnati, OH·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Generate single-cell RNA sequencing data, which measure gene activity in individual cells, from pancreatic tumors of 75 Black African American and 75 White patients to expand the diversity of human pancreatic cancer atlases.
Elizabeth Nakasone
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop and validate a natural language processing model that extracts structured and unstructured clinical and pathology data from records, then use it to map tumor mutations in pancreatic cancer patients in Hawai‘i and link them to outcomes.
The school
Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.
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