About

SPECIAL INTERESTS

Dr. Philip M. Spanheimer’s clinical research focuses on the surgical management of cancer and patient outcomes. His goal is to understand the interaction and impact of patient factors and surgical management on recurrence, survival, and morbidity of treatment. The focus is to identify patient and tumor characteristics that can help individualize treatment. These areas of investigation also generate hypotheses for biologic and mechanistic studies. In addition to advancing knowledge, these projects provide opportunities to introduce trainees to research methods, allowing them to improve reasoning, writing, and presentation skills, as well as providing a more in-depth foundation to critically appraise the literature.

In addition to patient care, Dr. Spanheimer brings a patient-centered focus to the laboratory to understand disease processes and develop better treatments. His lab has several ongoing projects and collaborations centered around the question of how tumors, or subpopulations within tumors, adapt to therapeutics and become resistant. To investigate this, the team uses laboratory models and is particularly interested in using primary tumor tissue obtained from the operating room and primary tissue-derived models (organoids, patient-derived xenografts) to increase the translational relevance of experiments. Specific projects include characterizing reprogramming of tyrosine kinase signaling pathways with emerging resistance to endocrine therapy in ER+ breast cancer, using cell cycle structure as a framework to understand sensitivity to cell cycle inhibition, and using single-cell genomics to predict response to therapy and develop rationally informed treat

BOARD CERTIFICATIONS

Complex General Surgical Oncology – Board Certified (2020)
General Surgery – Board Certified (2016)

PUBLICATIONS

Search for publications on PubMed using Spanheimer P* as search criteria

ment strategies.