Letter of Hope from the Zangle Lab

Just a little way down the hill from Huntsman Cancer Institute, the Zangle Lab in the Department of Chemical Engineering is working on new technologies to choose the most effective therapies for each individual patient.

We are excited about a project that takes a new approach to measure the growth of cancer cells and predict which drugs may be most beneficial to patients with advanced metastatic breast cancer. Current drug screening methods require at least one month to get information about how a tumor responds to a drug. This is too long for patients with advanced disease. In the Zangle Lab, we developed a test using a sensitive microscopy technique that uses light to check individual cancer cells as they respond to a panel of drugs.

“Current drug screening methods require at least one month...Our goal is to predict clinical outcome within several days.”

We are working together with clinicians and basic scientists at Huntsman Cancer Institute to demonstrate that our approach works. Our goal is to predict clinical outcome within several days, a large improvement over the weeks or months required by existing approaches. We are also working on a related test to choose therapies for patients with melanoma, and we are exploring applications to other cancer types in collaboration with researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute.

We rely on the support of Huntsman Cancer Institute and the patients who participate in research studies. Thank you very much for helping future patients get the information they need to make treatment decisions.

Thank you,
The Zangle Lab