Dr. David T Ting

Gastrointestinal cancers are highly lethal cancers where the vast majority of patients are diagnosed too late and conventional therapies have largely been ineffective, making early detection and novel drug targets greatly needed. The Ting laboratory has been utilizing innovative technologies to characterize RNA expression patterns in cancer. Using single molecule sequencing, we have discovered a significant amount of “non-coding” repeat RNAs to be produced in high amounts at the earliest stages of cancer development, but not in normal tissues. These repeat RNAs can serve as a novel early detection cancer biomarker and they can be targeted as a new therapeutic avenue. In parallel, we have used single cell and microfluidic chip technologies to understand the factors involved in the development of metastatic behavior in individual tumor cells. We capture circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and using single cell RNA-seq we have gained unprecedented insight into the programs that drive metastatic spread. We are using these studies to develop blood based biomarkers and generate new therapies to stop the spread of cancer.