Dr. Hector Franco (Assistant Professor, Department of Genetics) has received a pilot study award from the Marsha Rivkin Center for Ovarian Cancer Research.
This two-year pilot titled “Identifying drivers of therapeutic resistance in ovarian cancer at single cell resolution” is based on the hypothesis that a select number of cells within the ovarian tumor milieu acquire the activation of oncogenic enhancers that drive critical gene expression programs needed for chemoresistance. As such, the individual cells containing these aberrant gene expression programs will be enriched within recurrent and metastatic tumor specimens and represent novel targets for therapeutic intervention.