Thomas Zangle
University of Utah, UT·Biomedical Engineering
Melanoma, a deadly skin cancer, can often be cured, but the two main treatment options each fail in some patients. Doctors currently have no reliable way to predict, for one patient, which therapy will work or whether the tumor will become resistant.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Engineering
- Topics
melanoma
BRAF V600E
functional precision oncology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Build an imaging platform that pairs quantitative phase imaging (QPI), a label-free microscopy method, with a new darkfield-based light-scatter module to measure traits of individual living melanoma cells.
- Develop an analysis pipeline for cell state kinetics, which tracks how single cells change over time, and test whether it predicts resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors or targeted therapy more accurately than current approaches.
- Benchmark the QuICK platform against existing methods using defined engineering milestones and quantitative performance goals, aiming for a classifier that stays accurate across heterogeneous tumor biopsies.
- Carry out a proof-of-principle study on clinical biopsies from melanoma patients to test whether QuICK can predict individual tumors' responses to candidate therapies.
More about the research
Functional precision oncology offers one route to an answer: take living tumor cells from a biopsy, expose them to candidate drugs, and watch how individual cells respond quickly enough to guide the treatment choice.
Why it matters
Melanoma patients with the BRAF V600E mutation must choose between immune checkpoint inhibitors and targeted therapy without knowing in advance which will work for them. A rapid test on a small living biopsy could help match each patient to the therapy most likely to succeed and flag likely resistance early. The prototype is intended to support future clinical trials, and the same live-cell approach could be extended to other cancers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Carrie Daniel-MacDougall
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether a prebiotic food-enriched diet (PreFED), delivered as prebiotic foods plus nutrition counseling, changes the gut microbiome and blood metabolites of metastatic melanoma patients receiving checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy.
Peter T. So
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Design optical compression schemes for differentiable microscopy by training front-end optics and the decompression algorithm together as one neural-network auto-encoder.
Qin Yan
Yale University, CT·Genetics
Dissect how loss of the epigenetic regulators KDM5B and SETDB1 triggers anti-tumor immune responses, testing whether it works by de-repressing retroelements, virus-like DNA normally kept silent, in melanoma models.
The school
University of Utah: 58 labs on PI Pages, $789M a year on research, 366 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.