Education & Training
- BS, American University of Beirut
- MD, American University of Beirut School of Medicine
- Postdoctoral research fellowship, St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital
- General Surgery Residency, UPMC
- Postdoctoral research fellowship, University of Pittsburgh
- Fellowship, Complex General Surgical Oncology, UPMC
- Fellowship, Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Surgery, UPMC
Representative Publications
Research Interest Summary
Research Interests
Do you currently have a research resident in your lab? Yes.
Christof Kaltenmeier (7/2019 - currently started his third year at the lab)
Have you previously mentored residents in research projects? Yes, for both clinical and basic science projects.
Project type: Basic/translational research
Project Title: The role of exercise training in sterile inflammation and malignancy
Project description: Moderate exercise training is an effective pre-operative therapy that provides multiple beneficial effects on patient’s physical fitness before surgery and can improve perioperative outcomes. In our clinically relevant murine liver Ischemia reperfusion (I/R) model we have shown that exercise preconditioning mitigates the inflammatory response to liver IRI protecting the liver against sterile inflammation and injury. In addition, we have also shown that immune changes regulated by exercise training can further decrease tumor growth and metastasis to the liver. Based on our previous findings we are currently investigating the potential role of exercise as a long-term training for the innate immune response through epigenetic and metabolic changes. In addition, our lab is also investigating the role of exercise training in improving the outcomes of liver grafts subjected to cold storage during the liver transplant.
Project type: Basic/translational research
Project Title: The role of Surgery in regulating prolonged inflammatory and pro-tumorigenic immune response to facilitate tumor growth and progression
Project description: The immune system is critical in the body’s response to. Studies have shown that patients who were subjected to a variety of tissue injuries have the presence of a conserved ‘genomic storm’ that dynamically alters the leukocyte transcriptome. This results in upregulation of the innate immune response and downregulation of the adaptive immune response. These early transcriptional changes have been shown to be predictive of clinical outcomes across a range of settings. Our current study focuses on the long term effects of surgery on the inflammatory response and immune cell regulation. We will be utilizing state of the art transcriptomic and epigenetic single cell analysis to study surgery-induced genomic alterations of the circulating and bone-marrow derived cells that precede long term pro-inflammatory and tumorigenic effects to facilitate tumor metastasis.
Project type: Basic/translational research
Project Title: The role of neutrophil extracellular traps in promoting tumor growth.
Project description: Neutrophils can form neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) consisting of extracellular extrusion of web-like DNA. NETs have recently been linked to tumor growth and progression. Recent findings from our lab have revealed that cancer cells attract neutrophils and induce NET formation in the tumor microenvironment (TME) leading to tumor growth. NETs can capture circulating cancer cells to form new metastaic foci. NETs can also increase cancer cells’ invasion and migration and proliferation. Moreover, we found that in patients with primary and metastatic liver tumors, the greater the serum evidence of NET formation or the presence of NETs on biopsy/resection specimens, the higher the risk of recurrence and worse overall survival. We currently continue the effort to better understand the role of NETs in tumor growth. We are currently studying the mechanisms by which NETs can promote tumor progression by 1) interacting with the tumor microenvironment to promote an immunosuppressive protumorigenic milieu and/or 2) directly interacting with cancer cells to support metabolic adaptation through effects on cellular metabolism.
Project type: Clinical research
Project title: Radiomics in primary and metastatic hepatic malignancies.
Project description: Radiomics is an emerging field and has a keen interest, especially in the oncology field. The process of a radiomics study consists of lesion segmentation, feature extraction, consistency analysis of features, feature selection, and model building. Radiomic features provides data on tumor phenotype as well as cancer microenvironment. Radiomics derived parameters, when associated with other pertinent data and correlated with outcomes data, can produce accurate robust evidence based clinical decision support systems. This project, in collaboration with radiology, aims to study the radiomic features of hepatocellular carcinoma and colorectal liver metastases prior to liver resection. The goal is to develop a prediction model of recurrence/survival to incorporate in clinical decision making and surveillance.