Welcome to the Marusyk Lab!

 

Despite often spectacular initial responses to targeted and chemo therapies, advanced cancers remain lethal. At the most basic level this lethality reflects two root causes: therapies fail to fully eliminate the disease and the residual cancers evolve reduced therapy sensitivity. Our mission is to develop an unbiased understanding of acquired resistance from eco-evolutionary angle. Rather than attempting to reduce therapy resistance to a single molecular mechanism,  we are trying to integrate consideration of all tumor-relevant cell-intrinsic and cell-extrinsic mediators in space and time. Using this knowledge, we seek to design new therapeutic approaches that consider the "moving target" nature of cancer ecosystems to enhance the odds of therapeutic eradication and suppress the ability of tumors to adapt. To achieve these goals, we are using multi-prong integrative approaches combining experimental studies, mathematical modeling and clinical analyses.