Mentors

Paul Mischel, M.D.
Anna M. Wu, Ph.D.
Ingo Mellinghoff, M.D.

Research Interests:

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common malignant brain tumor of adults and one of the most lethal cancers. Despite surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, these tumors usually recur and the median survival for GBM patients remains to be one year from the time of diagnosis. The current diagnostic and monitoring tools for GBM rely heavily on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and biopsies taken from surgeries for histology grading. However, these tools have their own limitations of discriminating between tumor and treatment, which lead to inadequate diagnosis and result in poor prognosis. We are moving to an era of predictive individualized care based on molecular classification and targeted therapy. Our laboratory recently reported that the co-expression of EGFRvIII and PTEN on GBM cells sensitized these cells to EGFR kinase inhibitors, but the expression of either molecule led to rapid tumor progression during the therapy. These results demonstrate the importance and necessity of identifying different molecular signatures of GBM in order to give appropriate responsive treatments. Thus, our laboratory is interested in designing a new modality that will overcome these limitations. We propose to address a key challenge: the development of novel molecular imaging probes for glioblastoma that will detect and localize tumors, classify and predict tumor grades and prognosis, and follow the progression/regression of the disease.

UCLA
Dept of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
Postdoctoral Researcher