Research
Although cancer continues to be a leading cause of death worldwide, how tumors evolve, metastasize, and respond to therapies in humans is not fully understood. This is partly due to the technical and computational challenges of deciphering the principles governing the formation and maintenance of tissue structures and functions. Consequently, the diagnosis and treatment of cancers remain suboptimal. While tissue function is orchestrated by interactions between cells and the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM), our current understanding, informed by spatial omics technologies, focuses primarily on cell-cell interactions. Thus, it is unclear how cells and ECM are spatially organized and orchestrated to drive cancer initiation and progression, and how therapeutics interact with immune cells and ECM in the intact tumor microenvironment (TME) ecosystem to define the diverse spectrum of therapeutic responses in human patients.
Our research aims to bridge these gaps by developing and integrating cutting-edge biomedical imaging, artificial intelligence (AI), and spatial omics technologies to advance biological and clinical discoveries for cancer biology, immunology, and pharmacology. We will:
1. Establish AI-powered spatial omics analysis tools to uncover the rules that govern spatiotemporal dynamics of tissue architecture and disease development.
2. Develop single-cell spatial pharmacology approaches to understand and overcome therapeutic resistance.
3. Create 3D high-plex single-cell spatial omics, spatial pharmacology, and computational analysis platforms to decipher and predict tissue architecture driving cancer progression and therapeutic response.
Our ultimate goal is to transform this knowledge into developing next-generation theragnostics to cure benign and malignant diseases.
