Asst Prof Shruti BHATT

Research focus of my laboratory is to identify treatment strategies and underlying mechanism of therapy-resistant cancers by studying phenotypic and genotypic tumor characteristics. I am most intrigued by the heterogeneous response of cancers to a wide range of therapies. By using mitochondrial priming as a platform, we have found that early changes in mitochondrial signaling can assign individualized in-vivo therapy for acute myeloid leukemia PDX models and patient tumors.

The primary goals of my laboratory are (i) to measure mitochondrial apoptosis signaling using BH3 profiling to accurately predict response to targeted therapy in blood cancer (ii) to understand why some leukemia cells persist during therapy (iii) to determine how to combine functional and genomic approaches to guide precision target identification in a relapsed cancers (iv) to study clonal architecture of leukemia relapse. To investigate these problems, we are doing functional measurements to determine how chemical vulnerabilities evolve during leukemia treatment and whether drug sensitivities in a relapsed disease can be linked to genetic abnormalities. We are performing multi-dimensional studies involving mitochondrial outer membrane potential measurements, targeted exome sequencing, transcriptomics and DNA barcoding. We are exploiting human blood cancer cell lines, patient-derived xenograft models and primary tumor specimens to address our hypothesis.

NCBI Pubmed link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/1HwcWK7S-9uoS-/bibliography/public/