Welcome to the Wendy Fantl Lab!

We are a research group that studies ovarian and kidney cancer to address areas of unmet clinical need related to drug resistance and immunotherapy. Why do a majority of ovarian cancer patients initially respond to chemotherapy but eventually experience relapse and chemotherapy-resistant disease? Why do some malignancies respond to immunotherapy whereas others do not? To answer these questions, we apply multi-parametric single-cell proteomic technologies (mass cytometry aka Cytometry by Time-Of-Flight (CyTOF) and CODetection by indEXing (CODEX) imaging) combined with specialized computational approaches for analyzing single-cell datasets. These technologies reveal cell heterogeneity and identify minority cell subpopulations of interest, such as those with roles in metastasis and therapeutic resistance, that would elude bulk analyses. We are deeply committed to translating our findings in the lab to helping patients.

Research keywords: high grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC), renal cell carcinoma (RCC), single cell proteomics, spatial proteomics, CyTOF, CODEX, trogocytosis, NK cells, immunotherapy, platinum resistance, PARP inhibitors, multimodal data analysis, tissue image analysis