Titles and Affiliations
Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences
Professor of Medicine and Urology, Keck School of Medicine
Professor of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering
Director, USC Michelson Convergent Science Institute in Cancer (CSI-Cancer)
Research area
Applying blood biopsy technology to understand cancer progression and find predictive markers that indicate how cancer will react to treatment.
Impact
Liquid biopsy, a blood test that detects cancer cells and other tumor-associated factors, is a promising, less-invasive alternative to tumor biopsy. In addition to more readily providing information about a patient’s cancer, its minimally invasive nature means several samples can be taken over time. This would allow clinicians to have real-time data on a tumor’s response to therapy, informing treatment decisions and potentially revolutionize the way cancer is managed. Liquid biopsies are not currently available for widespread clinical applications, but Drs. Kuhn and Hicks and their teams are pushing this new technology to expand the scope of what information can be derived from patient blood and exploring its potential in early detection as well as predicting cancer progression and recurrence.
Progress Thus Far
Rather than focusing only on tumor DNA in the blood, as many current liquid biopsy approaches do, Drs. Kuhn and Hicks’ team studies the full range of cells and cell-related material circulating in blood, which may capture a fuller picture of how breast cancer grows, spreads, and responds to treatment. The team advanced their imaging and computational tools to detect and analyze rare, cancer-related cells and particles in blood at the level of individual cells, expanding their ability to identify not just tumor cells but also related cell types that may reflect how a tumor interacts with the body and behaves over time. The team is also processing more than 350 patient blood samples across retrospective and prospective studies, including the INTERCEPT studies, which are focused on developing a blood test designed to work alongside mammography for earlier breast cancer detection. This work is helping build the datasets needed to determine whether these blood-based cellular patterns are linked to disease state, recurrence, treatment response, and risk.
What’s next
The team will expand their analyses across larger patient groups to determine which cellular patterns are linked to treatment response, recurrence, and markers of aggressive disease. They will continue their prospective INTERCEPT studies in women at increased risk, including in populations disproportionately affected by breast cancer disparities, to test whether these blood-based signals can be detected earlier in the disease course. Finally, the team will work to integrate cellular, blood plasma, and clinical information into patient-level models, with the goal of developing a blood test that can help classify a patient’s breast cancer and guide more personalized care.
Biography
Peter Kuhn, PhD is the founding director of the USC Michelson Convergent Science Institute in Cancer (CSI-Cancer). He is the Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences and has appointments as professor of medicine, urology, biomedical engineering, and aerospace & mechanical engineering.
Dr. Kuhn is a scientist and entrepreneur with a career-long commitment in personalized medicine and individualized cancer patient care. He is focused on the redesign of cancer care. His research is shedding new light on how cancer spreads through the body. This new science will lead to a personalized care strategy that is biologically informed and clinically actionable.
The USC Michelson CSI-Cancer with its laboratories in cancer proteo-genomics, patient health performance, and mathematical oncology are rapidly advancing our understanding of cancer as a disease in each individual patient, thereby improving healthcare effectiveness for cancer patients.
Dr. Kuhn is a physicist who trained initially at the Julius Maximilians Universität Würzburg, Germany, before receiving his master’s in physics at the University of Albany, Albany, NY in 1993 and his PhD in 1995. He then moved to Stanford University where he later joined the faculties of Medicine and Accelerator Physics. From 2002 to 2014, he established a translational science program at the Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA that brought together over forty scientists from basic, engineering, and medical sciences to work on understanding the spread of cancer in the human body. He has published over 200 peer reviewed scientific articles and filed 16 patents as a result of his research. Dr. Kuhn joined USC in 2014.
