Niki Zacharias Millward
Assistant Professor
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Department of Urology
Rewiring of cellular metabolism is hallmark of cancer. Metabolism fuels cellular growth and proliferation and is downstream of genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic changes. I seek to understand the metabolic changes that drive cancer progression, how these changes create therapeutic vulnerabilities, and how metabolic imaging can be used to monitor therapeutic response. Over the past six years, my team has generated some of the only PDX animal models of rare urological cancers that provide a powerful tool for understanding these subtypes and developing new, targeted therapeutic modalities for their treatment.
Our discoveries in these models can be further complemented and validated using our deep bank of patient tissues. Our goal is to create an integrated platform that generates animal models of rare urological cancers from patient tissue, carries out molecular analysis of these models to inform new therapeutic development, cross-validates these observations with banked patient tissues, and uses the resulting data to develop new clinical trials. My team works in the field of renal cell carcinoma, penile squamous cell carcinoma, and testicular cancer.
Education & Training
PhD, California Institute of Technology, 2004