Shiaowen Hsu
Duke University, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Surgery to remove a primary colorectal cancer is meant to cure it, yet up to 40% of patients later relapse with cancer that has spread. The cause is minimal residual disease (MRD): a small number of cancer cells, for example in the blood, that remain after surgery.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
Pharmacology
- Topics
colorectal cancer
minimal residual disease
MicroOrganoSpheres
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Test whether minimal residual disease cells from colorectal cancer patients that resist standard-of-care chemotherapy are more likely to metastasize and cause recurrence, using MicroOrganoSpheres grown from portal venous blood collected during surgery.
- Perform high-throughput drug screens on therapy-resistant MicroOrganoSphere clones to identify treatments that could eliminate residual cancer cells and prevent recurrence.
- Characterize the tumor biology of cancer cells captured from blood during colorectal cancer resection, to inform clinical trials of improved post-surgery therapy.
More about the research
MRD causes no symptoms and cannot be seen on standard tests such as CT scans. Meanwhile, the extra treatment given after surgery has barely changed in two decades.
Why it matters
Colorectal cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death in the US. Finding the residual cancer cells that drive relapse after surgery, and the drugs that kill them, could guide clinical trials of better post-surgery treatment. This could raise cure rates for patients with colorectal cancer.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Build a publicly available, expert-annotated multimodal colorectal cancer dataset. It will combine pathology whole-slide images, preoperative CT and MRI scans, and structured electronic medical record data.
Christopher LaRocca
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Identify which viral fiber structure, the part that attaches the virus to a cell, and which promoter, the genetic switch driving replication, give the strongest and most selective infection of human colorectal cancer cells, using cancer cell lines and patient-derived tissue slices.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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