Di Zhao
Assistant Professor
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Department of Experimental Radiation Oncology
The concept of personalized medicine has a prolonged impact on cancer therapeutics. It is increasingly clear that different therapeutic approaches are required for distinct molecular subtypes of cancers. Therefore, exploring the impact of vital genetic alterations on drug responsiveness is essential for developing biomarker-driven therapeutics. A decade of large-scale prostate cancer genomic study provides a comprehensive atlas of the genetic alterations, which have been foundational to defining new molecular subtypes. The research in my laboratory focuses on exploring context-specific therapeutics for newly defined prostate cancer subtypes harboring genetic alterations through uncovering their roles in prostate cancer development and therapeutic resistance. Specifically, we are interested in (1) understanding the cell-intrinsic and -extrinsic mechanisms of these emerging genetic mutations contributing to prostate cancer progression; (2) determining their impacts on responsiveness to targeted therapies and immunotherapies in prostate cancer; (3) searching for context-specific therapeutic targets and effective combinations for advanced prostate cancers. In the light of such knowledge and detailed mechanism studies, the development of personalized medical care for prostate cancer patients with distinct molecular subtypes will become possible. My laboratory has generated several novel genetically engineered prostate cancer mouse models with diverse genetic alterations, providing us excellent tools to study the prostate cancer progression, illuminate the interaction between cancer cell and the tumor microenvironment, as well as develop novel therapeutic strategies. Additionally, we use unbiased and high-throughput approaches, including Synthetic Lethality Screening, CyTOF, IP-MS, Reverse Phase Protein Array, next-generation RNA Sequencing, Chromatin Immunoprecipitation Sequencing, and ATAC Sequencing.
Education & Training
PhD, Fudan University, 2014