University of Southern California Los Angeles, California
Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences Professor of Medicine and Urology, Keck School of Medicine Professor of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Director, USC Michelson Convergent Science Institute in Cancer (CSI-Cancer)
Applying blood biopsy technology to understand cancer progression and find predictive markers that indicate how cancer will react to treatment.
Liquid biopsy, a blood test that detects cancer cells and other tumor-associated factors, is a promising, less-invasive alternative to tumor biopsy. In addition to more readily providing information about a patient’s cancer, its minimally invasive nature means several samples can be taken over time. This would allow clinicians to have real-time data on a tumor’s response to therapy, informing treatment decisions and potentially revolutionizing the way cancer is managed. Liquid biopsies are not currently available for widespread clinical applications, but Drs. Kuhn and Hicks and their teams are pushing this new technology to expand the scope of what information can be derived from patient blood and exploring its potential in early detection as well as predicting cancer progression and recurrence.
Using a combination of data science, biotechnology, and mathematical tools, the teams explore an array of circulating cells – not just tumor cells thought to influence cancer evolution and metastatic progression – but also immune cells and other tumor-responsive cells not previously studied by liquid biopsy. Through this work, Drs. Hicks, Kuhn, and their teams dramatically improved the methodology for liquid biopsies, leading to the creation of an ‘Atlas’ of the 16-plus distinct cell types that uniquely populate the blood of people with breast cancer and are not found in healthy individuals. Recently, they have demonstrated the ability to accurately distinguish early-stage and late-stage cancer from each other and from normal blood.
Motivated by their recent discovery, they are pursuing further investigations to determine whether a simple blood draw could enhance or even replace mammography in routine screening for breast cancer before any symptoms emerge. Their immediate focus will be to activate clinical studies that aim to evaluate their technology’s ability to detect early-stage breast cancer compared to mammography screening. Concurrently, they will optimize their machine learning methods to identify and quantitate cell types and states through their High Definition Single Cell Assay (HD-SCA) workflow. The HD-SCA identifies rare cells and characterizes the genes and proteins that are present in a single cell. It can therefore explore different phases of a disease at the single-cell level. The team will pursue additional studies on the origin and composition of particles shed by cancer cells into the blood as they are discovered.
Peter Kuhn, PhD is the founding director of the USC Michelson Convergent Science Institute in Cancer (CSI-Cancer). He is the Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences and has appointments as professor of medicine, urology, biomedical engineering, and aerospace & mechanical engineering.
Dr. Kuhn is a scientist and entrepreneur with a career-long commitment in personalized medicine and individualized cancer patient care. He is focused on the redesign of cancer care. His research is shedding new light on how cancer spreads through the body. This new science will lead to a personalized care strategy that is biologically informed and clinically actionable.
The USC Michelson CSI-Cancer with its laboratories in cancer proteo-genomics, patient health performance, and mathematical oncology are rapidly advancing our understanding of cancer as a disease in each individual patient, thereby improving healthcare effectiveness for cancer patients.
Dr. Kuhn is a physicist who trained initially at the Julius Maximilians Universität Würzburg, Germany, before receiving his master’s in physics at the University of Albany, Albany, NY in 1993 and his PhD in 1995. He then moved to Stanford University where he later joined the faculties of Medicine and Accelerator Physics. From 2002 to 2014, he established a translational science program at the Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA that brought together over forty scientists from basic, engineering, and medical sciences to work on understanding the spread of cancer in the human body. He has published over 200 peer reviewed scientific articles and filed 16 patents as a result of his research. Dr. Kuhn joined USC in 2014.
2011
The Women's Cancer Research Fund Award
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