Department of Surgery researchers are exploring new therapies and diagnostic tools for colon and rectal cancer.
Colorectal cancer is an extremely complex disease that can act many different ways in the body. We are focused on those differences and designing treatments that affect how colorectal cancer develops, progresses and spread.
One of our major goals is to use the cells, tissues or organs derived from human pluripotent stem cells to model "diseases in a dish" and perform drug discovery using these disease models. This includes deriving iPS cells from skin biopsies of patients, directing iPS differentiation to mature cells and mimicking "disease environment" in vitro. For this purpose, we have generated novel human colon organoids as a modeling platform.
