Wei Wei, PhD – an accomplished cancer researcher with expertise in biotechnology and cancer systems biology – has been promoted to ISB associate professor. The Wei Lab focuses on understanding how cancer cells adapt to therapeutic treatment to foster therapy resistance by coordinating their internal molecular machinery and how these adaptive changes evolve within diverse tumors influenced by the tumor microenvironment.
A recently developed method by the Wei Lab at Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) and University of California, Riverside provides new insights into cancer biology by allowing researchers to show how fatty acids are absorbed by single cells. This work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
To advance research at the intersection of COVID-19 and cancer, The Andy Hill CARE Fund has awarded ISB Assistant Professor Dr. Wei Wei a $100,000 grant to study chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), one of the most commonly diagnosed leukemias in the Western world that mainly affects older individuals.
Despite the aggressive nature of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC), circulating tumor cells that lead to metastases often go undetected in the blood. ISB researchers in Dr. Wei Wei’s lab and their collaborators have developed a novel method to better detect these circulating cells.
By using single-cell analysis to measure metabolic activities in rare disseminated tumor cells taken from non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients, ISB researchers and their collaborators can accurately predict how patients will respond to various cancer therapies, and how treatments will impact a patient’s physiological performance and survival.
