Webinar
Exploring new frontiers in pancreatic cancer treatment with spatial biology
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains one of the deadliest cancers, with limited treatment options and a high recurrence rate. Emerging research suggests that the tumor microenvironment (TME) and metastatic site play a critical role in therapy response. In this webinar, Yana Zavros will discuss how she combined spatial biology and patient-derived organoids (PDOs) to uncover a distinct cell population driving therapy resistance and disease recurrence in PDAC.
Topics to be covered:
- Mapping the TME across metastatic sites to guide treatment strategies
- Using spatial biology and PDOs to identify therapy-resistant cell populations in PDAC
- An introduction to high throughput multiplex immunofluorescence for TME characterization
Speakers:
Yana Zavros, PhD
Professor, University of Georgia School of Medicine
Dr. Zavros received her PhD from the University of Melbourne (Australia), and her research has largely focused on gastrointestinal disease. While at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, she pioneered the use of human gastric and pancreatic organoids to examine underlying mechanisms driving initiation and progression of cancer development and the use of organoids as predictive models for therapeutic intervention. While at the University of Arizona, Dr. Zavros served as associated head for research and director of the Tissue Acquisition and Cellular/Molecular Analysis Shared Resource (TACMASR) at the University of Arizona Cancer Center. As the shared resource director, she established the BioDROids (Biology, Development and Research of Organoids) core. Dr Zavros has recently been appointed as Professor of Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences and serves as director of the inaugural University of Georgia’s School of Medicine Research Center.
Tad George, PhD
Senior VP Bio R&D, RareCyte
Tad has over 15 years of startup experience dedicated to creating scientific markets for novel instrumentation platforms that span basic research, drug discovery and clinical applications. Prior to joining RareCyte, Tad has held similar positions at Biodesy, Inc. and DVS Sciences, and was Director of Biology at Amnis Corporation. Tad completed his B.A. in Biochemistry from the Univ. of Texas at Austin, Ph.D. in Immunology from UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and post-doctoral training at Immunex Corp. in Seattle.