Popel Aleksander SProfessor

Research Interests
Quantitative Cancer Biology and Therapeutics
The overarching goal of the Systems Biology Laboratory is to apply modern methods of biomedical engineering to better understand the mechanisms of cancer and to significantly advance treatments for this devastating disease. Cancer cells invade into healthy tissues and co-opt these tissues into promoting tumor growth and metastasis. They use multitude of ways to evade therapeutics by adapting to drugs making them ineffective. To control and conquer the disease, the applications of modern quantitative methods are absolutely necessary; our laboratory is at the cutting edge of the cancer systems biology research. The research in the laboratory is broad and uses a combination of experimental and computational approaches. We investigate cancer at different levels from genes to proteins to tumor, and eventually to the whole body. We look into the ways the factors that stimulate tumor growth (eg growth factors) signal to the interior of the cell, and how cancer cells communicate with their neighbors such as immune cells and vascular cells. We develop and test novel drugs to treat different types of cancer.