Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Dr. Fan studies how turning off oncogenes (cancer genes) can cause tumor regression in preclinical and clinical studies. Based on preclinical findings, she has initiated clinical trials studying how tyrosine kinase inhibitors impact the hypoxia pathway in kidney cancer and the use of atorvastatin for the treatment of patients with certain non-Hodgkin's lymphomas. In the laboratory, she also uses preclinical models of cancer to validate new nanotechnology strategies for tumor diagnosis and treatment. She has shown that a new nano-immunoassay (NIA) can be used to measure how well drugs work in tumor cells sampled from individual patients with leukemia, lymphoma and myelodysplastic syndrome taking novel targeted therapies (Fan et al. Nature Medicine 2009, Seetharam, Fan et al. Leukemia Research 2012, Fan et al Oncotarget 2012). She is currently expanding her translational research to include early diagnostics, therapeutic monitoring, and prediction of response to therapeutics in solid tumors such as kidney cancer and lung cancer, with the goal of helping to make personalized medicine possible.
