Mingqi Han
Assistant Professor
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Department of Cancer Systems Imaging
Research Description
Our laboratory studies cancer metabolism using a multimodal imaging platform to provide a top-down dissection of tumors across spatial scales, from whole-tumor metabolic signatures to subcellular ultrastructure. We aim to address two fundamental questions: (1) how the tumor microenvironment shapes tumor metabolic states (2) how inter-organelle communication coordinates metabolic processes and support tumor growth. A major focus of our research is mitochondrial biology and inter-organelle communication. We investigate how mitochondria interact with lipid droplets, lysosomes, and the cytoskeleton to regulate cellular metabolism, and how these organelle networks are remodeled during cancer development and in response to microenvironment reprogramming. We are particularly interested in lipid metabolism and how lipid uptake, storage, and utilization influence metabolic crosstalk between tumor and immune cells.
We integrate quantitative biomedical imaging with multi-omics approaches to investigate these questions across molecular, cellular, and whole-animal scales. Technologies include PET/CT metabolic imaging, intravital microscopy, confocal microscopy, 3D volume electron microscopy, single-cell RNA sequencing, spatial lipidomics, and metabolomics. We also develop machine learning-based image analysis approaches to quantitatively characterize cellular and subcellular phenotypes.
Potential graduate students will have opportunities to develop interdisciplinary projects spanning cancer biology, immunometabolism, imaging, and computational analysis. Our goal is to uncover metabolic and organelle-level mechanisms that drive cancer progression and identify new vulnerabilities that can be exploited for cancer detection and therapy.
Key words: cancer metabolism, inter-organelle communication, quantitative imaging, lipid metabolism, machine learning-based image analysis, PET/CT, serial block-face electron microscopy, multi-omics
Education & Training
PhD (Medicine), The University of Sydney Children's Medical Research Institute, 2018