New paradigms for therapeutic intervention
Rather than drugging cancer cells directly, we target metabolic processes in healthy cells to prevent them from supporting cancer cells.
New paradigms for therapeutic intervention
Rather than drugging cancer cells directly, we target metabolic processes in healthy cells to prevent them from supporting cancer cells.
Research in the Patti Lab
Our work is highly interdisciplinary, spanning three complementary areas: cancer biology, technology development, and computational biology. Team members have diverse scientific backgrounds and interests but have synergistic goals that promote collaborative activities within the group. The result is a vibrant training environment where investigators from different disciplines continuously learn from one another. Collectively, the team’s breadth of expertise provides unique scientific perspective and makes us particularly well suited to address some of the grandest challenges in biology and medicine.
Cancer Biology
Cancer cells have the capacity to proliferate uncontrollably. With each division cycle, a cell’s entire contents must be synthesized. We study how metabolism is adapted to support the anabolic demands of proliferation, with the ultimate goal of discovering therapeutics that target tumor growth.
We are interested in metabolic adaptations that are conserved across many cancers, such as the Warburg effect, as well as those that are specific to certain types of tumors or oncogenes. To this end, we investigate a spectrum of malignancies ranging from glioma and melanoma to gynecological and colorectal cancers.
Interestingly, we find that oncogenic transformation not only alters the metabolism of the malignant cell, but that it also has the ability to rewire the metabolism of healthy cells throughout the host. In some cases, a single tumor can hijack the metabolism of a tissue on the other side of the organism for its own benefit. One of our major goals is to understand how and why this occurs. We posit that tumors co-opt healthy cell metabolism to obtain metabolic precursors in support of proliferation. Accordingly, we wish to define which nutrients are exchanged between which cells and tissues.
Another question we are pursuing is how tumor growth is influenced by non-genetic factors such as the exposome (also known as the sum of the external factors that a person is exposed to during their lifetime). We are particularly interested in the mechanisms by which diet and pollutant chemicals stimulate tumor growth, metastasis, and perhaps most importantly, cancer initiation.