Tikvah (Tiki) Hayes

10-155A Factor Building

Positions & Affiliations:

Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology

Member, Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, Signal Transduction and Therapeutics Program

Research Description:

Our lab focuses on basic and pre-clinical mechanisms surrounding oncogene dependency, signal transduction, and therapeutic strategies. We seek to describe the underlying mechanisms driving 1) the transition from a normal cell state to a diseased cell state and 2) how the diseased cell state responds to available therapeutic regimens.

Identifying and understanding of variants of unknown significance (VUS) and development of resistance to targeted therapies represent two significant challenges facing current cancer care. Increased targeted panel sequencing of patients will continue to reveal variants lacking functional annotation. Thus, our lab strives to establish systematic methods to proactively assess the functionality of unknown variants in cancer. The second focus of our lab is to investigate the mechanisms underlying both sensitivity and resistance to targeted therapies. To address these important questions, we use a combination of high-throughput genetic screening, novel assay development, molecular biology, and inhibitor sensitivity/resistance analyses in an effort to understand variant biology and improve clinical outcomes.