PME Thesis Defense: Jono Matthews (Molecular and Computational Platforms for Cancer Drug Screening and Precision Therapy)

My research focuses on the development and exploration of cancer drug screening platforms that are simultaneously high-throughput and high-content. The fractal nature of cancer heterogeneity, among patients and within individual tumors, has encouraged development of hundreds of unique drugs and therapeutic regimens, with the ambition of matching each patient to an ideal treatment option. The rich space of possible treatments are infeasible to comprehensively study en masse through clinical trials, motivating the use of in vitro and ex vivo disease models to screen and hone in on promising candidates. Effective drug screening must both explore the large treatment space and also extract rich measurements per-condition to capture nuanced pathophysiological processes. I will share a novel molecular barcoding and microfluidic strategy to efficiently measure the transcriptomic responses of thousands of individual cells to each possible combination of multiple cancer drugs under study. I will also share a deep-learning software platform for automated morphological analysis of patient-derived organoid drug screening experiments. Lastly, I will present related tools for prototyping high-throughput microfluidic devices, as well as an innovative molecular method to reduce the adverse effects of cytotoxic chemotherapy. These works contribute to the effort to refine and characterize treatment options for cancer patients.

<a href="https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/94287914386?pwd=ZXdTUEdSZUd6WXJ5L2VEbnlINXJ5… Link</a>