(Spencer, Sabrina Leigh - 2021) -- Emerging Leader Award
Overview
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Sabrina Spencer, PhD, University of Colorado Boulder: “Causes and Consequences of Rapid Cancer Cell Adaptation to MAPK Pathway Inhibitors” (co-funded with Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation) Dr. Spencer’s lab has combined novel computational and cell biology methods to develop a high-throughput time-lapse microscopy platform for studying how individual cancer cells respond and adapt to targeted therapies at a molecular level during the first few days of drug treatment. In this project, she is studying how drugs targeting the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway can be overcome in a small subset of cancer cells, focusing on the mechanisms of DNA damage and cell-cycle escape and re-entry. The proposed work is significant because these cancer cell subpopulations may represent a seed population that enables drug resistance and if understood, could be eliminated to reduce tumor relapse following treatment with MAPK pathway inhibitors.
