Dartmouth Events

Livestream: https://go.d-h.org/global1video

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the US, with a dismal 12% five-year survival rate. This poor prognosis attributes to several factors, including its complex tumor microenvironment (TME) with a desmoplastic stroma, which facilitates tumor growth/invasion, chemoresistance, and immunosuppressive TME. It also poses physical barriers to effective drug delivery. Thus, the stroma has been targeted to inhibit its pro-tumor roles and enhance the delivery and efficacy of drugs. But many of these strategies were not successfully translated, and even several recent studies have suggested the stroma may also have anti-tumor roles. In this context, my group performs translational engineering research to discover new therapeutic strategies to reprogram the PDAC stroma without compromising its anti-tumor roles.

In this talk, I will present our recent effort to test a hypothesis that the coagulation system in the PDAC TME can be targeted to reprogram PDAC stroma to overcome chemoresistance, drug delivery barriers, and immunosuppressive TME. For this research, we have been developing new in vitro microfluidic tumor models of the normal and cancerous pancreas. In conjunction with genetically engineered cells and preclinical animal models, the microfluidic PDAC platforms are further used to identify the role of key molecular targets of the coagulation system and to evaluate the effects of their pharmacological inhibition to develop effective strategies to reprogram the PDAC stroma. The latest results are further discussed with future research plans. I will conclude the talk by sharing my teaching philosophy to educate engineering students in this new and exciting area of translational engineering for oncology.