Georgetown Lombardi Visiting Professor and Grand Rounds Lecture Series: “The Role of CDX2 as a Prognostic and Predictive Biomarker to Guide the Clinical Management of Colon Cancer”

Title: “The Role of CDX2 as a Prognostic and Predictive Biomarker to Guide the Clinical Management of Colon Cancer”

Presented by:
Piero Dalerba, MD
Associate Member
Hackensack Meridian Health’s Center for Discovery and Innovation

Location: New Research Building Auditorium and via Zoom

Sponsors: Benjamin Tycko, MD, PhD, David Perlin, PhD, Gary Kupfer, MD, and David Robbins, PhD

Lecture Series Presented by Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center 

About the Speaker:

Dr. Dalerba directs a research laboratory whose main interest is to use modern “single-cell genomics” technologies to identify novel biomarkers of “cancer stem cells”, and to explore their potential as: 1) novel predictive biomarkers to improve treatment algorithms for cancer patients; 2) novel pharmacological targets to develop innovative anti-tumor treatments. Dr. Dalerba has a long-standing expertise in the biology and medical treatment of human colon cancer. His principal research contributions include: a) the discovery of robust and reliable surface markers for the ex vivo purification of human colon “cancer stem cells” (Dalerba et al., PNAS, 100:3983-3988, 2007); b) the first use of “single-cell genomics” to analyze the cell composition of human colorectal malignancies, and formally prove that tumor tissues behave as stem-cell systems by undergoing multi-lineage differentiation processes (Dalerba et al., Nature Biotechnology, 29:1120-1127, 2011); c) the identification of CDX2 as a candidate biomarker for the prediction of benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy in Stage-II and Stage-III colon cancer patients (Dalerba et al., NEJM, 374:211-222, 2016); and d) the discovery of inverse agonists of RAR/RXR signaling as novel class of anti-tumor agents with activity against human adenoid cystic carcinomas (Viragova et al., JNCI, 115:838-852, 2023).