Jeremy Kratz

Focus Groups

Cancer Biology

Education

MD, University of Michigan

Research Summary

Therapeutic resistance in hepatobiliary cancers
Rational informed therapeutic strategies
Cancer Stem Cell (CSC) enrichment

Research Detail

Over the last several decades, primary liver and pancreatic cancers have conferred significant risk of cancer-related mortality with limited therapeutic development. The Kratz lab is focused on translating findings of patient-derived organoid models of these cancers to characterize clinically significant resistance mechanisms. These investigations include advanced tissue culture techniques, molecular profiling, therapeutic screening, on-target validation, and animal models. Although patient-derived cancer organoids (PCOs) have been developed for surrogate disease modeling, they rely upon an enrichment of CSCs which are known to confer therapeutic resistance. Using patient-derived organotypic cultures, ex vivo resistance to therapeutics in early phase clinical trials will be derived in human disease. These cultures will serve as discovery platforms to track CSC enrichment and map transcriptional mechanisms of resistance to develop rationale pathways to overcome resistance with targeted and metabolic inhibitors. These mechanisms will be analyzed using bioinformatic pipelines and compared to clinical outcomes as novel biomarkers in advanced cancer. The goal of these projects is to refine rational therapeutic strategies for early phase clinical trial development.

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