Research Interests

The Goal

Our laboratory employs a multi-pronged approach combining technology development with multi-“omics” strategies to design blood-based assays for cancer diagnosis and monitoring. The long-term goal of our work is to enable sensitive and multiplexable profiling of both genomic and functional biomarkers with a simple blood draw. The ability to noninvasively and quantitatively measure cancer-specific biomarkers permits real-time longitudinal monitoring of patients at every stage of treatment.

Current Research Projects
Noninvasive cancer monitoring

Noninvasive cancer monitoring

Developing quantitative liquid biopsy assays for detection of early-stage and occult tumors

Cell-based enzymatic assays

Cell-based enzymatic assays

Engineering synthetic functional probes to quantify tumorigenic signals

Single-cell Omic Profiling

Single-cell Omic Profiling

Creating novel microfluidic tools for high-resolution multi-omic profiling

Technology

We will use a variety of tools, techniques, and workflows in our laboratory. Some anticipated technologies are:

  • Digital PCR (dPCR)
  • Genotyping/Methylation assays
  • Peptide synthesis
  • Mass spectrometry
  • DNA/RNA sequencing
  • mRNA display