About
Assistant Professor
Department of Radiology
UCLA
Project title: Integrative multi-omic hierarchical analysis of undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma tissue microenvironment
Mentors:
Alexander Hoffmann, PhD - UCLA
Albert Thomas, PhD - UCLA
Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD - UCLA
Multidisciplinary Expertise:
systems biology, mathematical modeling, biochemical reaction networks, multi-omic data integration, cross-sectional clinical imaging
Project Description:
Undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma (UPS) are tumors that do not all respond to radiation treatment (RT) as expected and this variation is likely attributable, at least in part, due to differences in the populations of immune cells that infiltrate the tumors. We hypothesize that RT affects the metabolic state of the immune cells as well as tumors and that hierarchical measurements provide a means to classify different RT treatment responsive tumors across multiple spatial scales. We will employ a systems approach for metabolic characterization of the multi-cellular interactions in the sarcoma microenvironment using multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) in conjunction with high-resolution tissue imaging and multi-omics characterization of cells in order to construct models of metabolism building upon the constraint-based modeling framework. The resulting analyses may provide insights into the different metabolic states of the cells and how different cell populations could be targeted to respond to new drug therapies.