FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECTS

“Inhibiting Oxidative Phosphorylation: A Novel Strategy in Leukemia”. In collaboration with Dr. Marina Konopleva from UT MD Anderson, this project currently funded by the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) aims to perform pre-clinical testing of a novel inhibitor of oxidative phosphorylation in acute myeloid leukemia models. Metabolic flux analysis using ¹³C stable isotopes are used for understanding drug mechanism

“Novel 3D Co-Culture Systems as Models of the Bone Marrow Microenvironment for High-Content Metabolomic Drug Screening”. This project partially funded by SPORE Career Development Grant aims to develop high-throughput compatible 3D co-culture systems to examine interactions among cellular populations isolated from pediatric leukemia patients

“Phase 2 Study of TH-302 for the Treatment of Glioblastoma”. This is a collaborative project with Dr. Andrew Brenner from the Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC) of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. The overall goal of this project, currently funded by the FDA is to assess the benefit of TH-302, a nitroimidazole prodrug, in glioblastoma patients using molecular imaging and biomarker profiling to reveal which patients are the most likely to benefit from treatment with the agent.

• Collaborative projects focusing on amino acid depletion therapy targeting cysteine (Drs Georgiou, DiGiovanni, and Stone) and kynurenine (Dr. Georgiou) using engineered human enzymes are currently funded by NIH (RO1) and CPRIT, respectively. Metabolomics analysis of cell lines and mice samples are currently employed for monitoring the metabolic response following cancer treatment.

• Another area of intense research focuses on autoimmune diseases; high throughput screening of a library of natural products combined with current drug therapy is used to target the metabolome and define new treatment strategies in inflammatory arthritis and in other non-cancer conditions.