Technology Development Core

Dr. Chinnaiyan’s research has focused on functional genomic and bioinformatics approaches to study cancer for the purposes of understanding cancer biology as well as to discover clinical biomarkers. His group has characterized a number of important biomarkers of prostate cancer including AMACR, EZH2, the sarcosine metabolite, and most recently the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) Schlap1.

The Thurber lab is focused on designing new molecular imaging agents and uses a joint theoretical and experimental approach, applying fundamental chemical engineering principles, to utilize models while developing new imaging agents and measuring their properties and distribution. The lab research interest also extends to quantitative pharmacology.

Dr. Wahl is a physician scientist at the University of Michigan specializing in cancers of the central nervous system. His research focuses on the development of new treatment strategies for brain tumors and his laboratory group is especially interested in interactions between radiation and abnormal metabolism in glioblastoma. In the clinic, he cares for a wide variety of patients with both malignant and benign tumors of the central nervous system.

The Luker lab studies functions of cell signaling in primary and metastatic cancer. Our multidisciplinary group combines expertise in medicine, biology, and engineering to uncover the mechanisms by which biochemical events in the tumor microenvironment, including chemokine signaling, metabolic regulation, and extracellular matrix interactions regulate the disease progression and response to therapy.

The Rao lab works at the intersection of genomics  and  image informatics, across biological scale (cells, tissue and organ). Dr. Rao’s group is interested in developing multi-modal decision algorithms that link and integrate various measurements (imaging, genomics etc) to characterize disease. Their algorithms for phenotypic measurements encompass data from 2D/3D microscopy, radiology and histopathology.

Schwendeman’s principal research interest is to understand how phospholipid composition of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) affects its potency and to design short synthetic peptides that mimic various functions of Apolipoprotein A-I, the main HDL protein. Laboratory work focuses on HDL for treatment of sepsis, Alzheimer’s disease, complications of diabetes, lupus and other autoimmune diseases and using synthetic HDL nanoparticles for targeted drug delivery purposes and designing artificial HDL based on gold nanoparticles.

Dr. Andjelkovic-Zochowska’s research focuses on the molecular basis of inflammation in the central nervous system, particularly inflammatory molecular events at the blood brain barrier.