experts

Dr. John Paul Y.C. Shen is a physician-scientist with a scientific background in chemical biology, functional genomics, and systems biology leading a lab team of computational, experimental, and clinical scientists who work together studying the genomics and transcriptomics of appendiceal and colorectal cancers. They combine knowledge gained from testing model systems (cell lines, organoids, mouse models), molecular profiling of tumors taken from patients, and have recently built a software system to capture clinical information from the over 3,000 patients with CRC and 400 patients with appendix cancer treated at MDA every year so that they can learn from patients, not on clinical trials (so-called real-world data). With these complementary sources of data they are trying to move away from the historical one-size-fits-all approach to chemotherapy to truly personalized or precision oncology.