KEY APPLICATION AREA

Translational Diagnostic Technologies

Precision medicine, defined as the tailored treatment of each individual's disease based on the disease's molecular profile, is poised to revolutionize medical treatment in the 21st century. With the advent and maturation of high throughput DNA and RNA sequencing technologies, the intricate details of each individual's disease are becoming visible in a way never before possible. For example, about 30% of endometrial cancer patients will experience recurrence, and new sequencing methods are allowing minimum residual disease detection to stratify patients into high-risk groups and low-risk groups, so that more aggressive therapies can be pursued for high-risk patients and unnecessary adjuvant therapies can be eliminated for low-risk patients.

At the Rice University Department of Bioengineering, we are developing new technologies to enable these new ways of individualizing disease treatment, and collaborate with clinicians and clinical researchers at MD Anderson and the rest of the Texas Medical Center to apply these technologies to retrospective (banked) clinical specimen as well as prospective clinical studies.