Speaker

“Cancer is as unique as the person fighting it”, this is why we need to have a personalized approach to cancer treatment. With the exception of a few biomarker-driven therapies, most patients are treated with chemo or radiotherapy and many times go through rounds of trial-and-error approaches to find the best treatment. One of our major goals in the Lab is to develop a test to help MDs choose the best available therapy for each individual patient, using zebrafish Avatars. The Lab also investigates the cellular and molecular interactions that occur between human tumor cells and zebrafish innate immune cells. Innate immune cells are the first line of defense of the organism against infection, damage or any other threats, and are highly present in the tumor ecosystem. These cells can behave as “good cops” (protecting the host against cancer) or as corrupted “bad cops” (helping the tumor). Our goal is to understand these processes and use the zebrafish xenografts to discover new therapies to be combined with immunotherapy.