The research focus of the Wong laboratory revolves around understanding the regulatory mechanisms that control epithelial stem cell homeostasis and their expansion in developmental, homeostasis and disease contexts, including cancer. I have substantial training and experience in intestinal stem cell investigation leveraging in vivo and ex vivo modeling, as well as in myriad cutting edge technologies (i.e. cyCIF, scRNA-seq). My publication record spans my post-doctoral fellowship in Dr. Jeffrey Gordon’s laboratory at Washington University School of Medicine, to studies in my own laboratory at Oregon Health & Science University. Our research impacts the understanding of regulatory mechanisms that govern cell state in the context of the evolving tissue microenvironment and changing cell signaling landscape, in development and disease.

Our studies in stem cell regulation led to the intriguing finding that stem cells can fuse with tissue macrophages in the context of injury repair and may impact tissue regeneration. We have extended these findings to the cancer setting, where cancer-macrophage fusions are detectible in primary and metastatic tumors, and my group recently identified and characterized these cells as a novel circulating tumor cell population. Importantly, our studies in cell culture, in mice and humans provide an indepth evaluation of hybrid cells to set the foundation for continued investigations into their biology, impact on disease progression or tissue regeneration, and use as a biomarker for disease burden. Importantly, we coined the term, circulating hybrid cell (CHC) for this novel population and reported they exist at higher levels than conventionally defined circulating tumor cells in the peripheral blood of cancer patients. This work was published in 2018 and highlighted by Science Magazine as one of the top ten publications in the cancer field in the science family journals. The science proposed in this U01 application leverage hybrid cell biology to assess treatment response and resistance in breast cancer patients undergoing targeted therapy. Our proposal leverages active collaborations with Dr. Young Hwan Young’s group to synergize biology with computation, as well as a number of other valuable collaborators to ensure success of the proposed, cutting-edge science.

Oregon Stem Cell Center: https://www.ohsu.edu/stem-cell-center/melissa-wong-phd

Wong Lab: https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/wong-lab

Michael Berger, PhD, holds the Elizabeth and Felix Rohatyn Chair and is Associate Director of the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a multidisciplinary initiative to promote precision oncology through genomic analysis to guide the diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients. He is also an Associate Attending Geneticist in the Department of Pathology with expertise in cancer genomics, computational biology, and high-throughput DNA sequencing technology. His laboratory is developing experimental and computational methods to characterize the genetic makeup of individual cancers and identify genomic biomarkers of drug response and resistance. As Scientific Director of Clinical NGS in the Molecular Diagnostics Service, he oversees the development and bioinformatics associated with clinical sequencing assays, and he helped lead the development and implementation of MSK-IMPACT, a comprehensive FDA-authorized tumor sequencing panel that been used to profile more than 60,000 tumors from advanced cancer patients at MSK. The resulting data have enabled the characterization of somatic and germline biomarkers across many cancer types and the identification of mutations associated with clonal hematopoiesis. Dr. Berger also led the development of a clinically validated plasma cell-free DNA assay, MSK-ACCESS, which his laboratory is using to explore tumor evolution, acquired drug resistance, and occult metastatic disease. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Physics from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard University.

Dr. Raza is a Professor of Medicine and Director of the MDS Center at Columbia University in New York, NY. She started her research in Myelodisplastic Syndromes (MDS) in 1982 and moved to Rush University, Chicago, Illinois in 1992, where she was the Charles Arthur Weaver Professor in Oncology and Director, Division of Myeloid Diseases. The MDS Program, along with a Tissue Repository containing more than 50,000 samples from MDS and acute leukemia patients was successfully relocated to the University of Massachusetts in 2004 and to Columbia University in 2010.

Before moving to New York, Dr. Raza was the Chief of Hematology Oncology and the Gladys Smith Martin Professor of Oncology at the University of Massachussetts in Worcester. She has published the results of her laboratory research and clinical trials in prestigious, peer reviewed journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Blood, Cancer, Cancer Research, British Journal of Hematology, Leukemia, and Leukemia Research. Dr. Raza serves on numerous national and international panels as a reviewer, consultant and advisor and is the recipient of a number of awards.