Research Team

Dr. Amina Zoubeidi is co-leader of SPORE Project 2: Understanding and Targeting the Lineage Plasticity in the Genomic Umbrella Neoadjuvant Study (GUNS)

Dr. Zoubeidi is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Cancer Therapy Resistance. Her research  aims to uncover how standard care of prostate cancer therapy targeting the androgen receptor (AR) induces treatment resistance and controls phenotypic plasticity, which has been associated with the clinically relevant problem of drug resistance in prostate cancer. Importantly, amplification of different signaling pathways may be unique to an individual and their disease; therefore, her research program is designed to identify and understand common signaling nodes responsible for the emergence of resistance to ultimately design the best combination therapy to guide clinical decisions.

Dr. Amy Moran is co-leader of SPORE Project 3: Modulating Androgen Receptor Signaling to Enhance the Efficacy of CAR T Cell Therapy for Advanced Prostate Cancer.

Dr. Moran started her research journey in the laboratory of Dr. Monica Bertagnolli (current NCI director) at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston where she learned of the joys of conducting translational cancer research. She then earned her PhD in Microbiology, Cancer Biology and Immunology from the University of Minnesota where she trained with Dr. Kristin Hogquist revealing how T cell receptor signal strength was critical for lineage fate decisions during development. It was during this time that she developed the Nur77GFP reporter mouse that is widely used today! She joined the department of Cell, Developmental & Cancer Biology at Oregon Health & Science University in May of 2017 where she is currently an Associate Professor. Today, her research focuses on how sex hormones regulate multiple aspects of T cell biology. Her group utilizes a variety of tools to interrogate fundamental and translational questions with a common goal of rapidly moving benchtop discoveries back to the clinic. To meet this goal, she partners with clinicians and computational biologists, trains graduate students and postdocs and collaborates across multiple disciplines to improve clinical outcomes for cancer patients.

Heather H. Cheng, MD, PhD, is a co-leader of Project 1: Molecular Predictors of Prostate Cancer Progression and Mortality.

Dr. Cheng focuses on improving the care of patients with prostate and bladder cancers. She is the director of Fred Hutch's Prostate Cancer Genetics Clinic, which helps bring leading-edge genetic and genomic discoveries to patients. Among the first of its kind in the country, the clinic provides genetic counseling and testing, matches patients with precision oncology clinical trials and provides opportunities for cancer prevention and early detection. She is studying ways to use genetics to guide the care of prostate cancer patients and their family members who may also be at high risk for the disease. Dr. Cheng leads clinical trials of a variety of new treatments for prostate cancer. She is also developing new tests that could help guide doctors’ choice of treatment for each patient and new blood tests to detect and monitor the progression of prostate cancer. 

Dr. Gavin Ha is Co-Director of SPORE Core C (Biostatistics and Bioinformatics).

Dr. Michael Schweizer is Co-Leader of SPORE Project 4: Clinical Development of Therapeutic Strategies Targeting Damage Repair.

Dr. Schweizer is an oncologist who specializes in treating patients with bladder, prostate and testicular cancers. His research focuses on developing new drugs and therapies to treat these cancers and to help speed advances from the lab into the clinic. He leads a number of innovative translational clinical trials, including studies evaluating high-dose testosterone as a therapeutic option for men with advanced prostate cancer.

Ruth Etzioni is an affiliate professor of biostatistics and health services at the University of Washington and a member of Fred Hutch. Dr. Etzioni directs Core C (Biostatistics and Analytics Core) of the PNW Prostate Cancer SPORE. Dr. Etzioni and her colleagues were among the first to formally evaluate the test’s ability to distinguish between true cancers and benign conditions. They have concluded that a variation on the PSA test that uses two types of PSA measurements could improve the test’s accuracy for men with borderline-normal total PSA levels, potentially leading to a significant drop in medical costs and complications for this group of men.  Etzioni and colleagues have also determined that roughly one-third of older men diagnosed with prostate cancer through the PSA test are “overdiagnosed” with the disease, meaning patients are receiving unnecessary surgeries or other treatments even though the disease isn’t likely to threaten their health. Dr. Etzioni’s work currently focuses on the development and implementation of statistical methods for prostate cancer studies. In the past, she has worked on assessing the efficacy of PSA screening from population studies, estimating the frequency of overdiagnosis associated with PSA, evaluating novel prostate cancer biomarkers, and tracking patterns and outcomes of prostate cancer care. Her work in prostate cancer surveillance is conducted as part of the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET). As leader of the biostatistics core for the Northwest Prostate Cancer SPORE, Dr. Etzioni has developed methods for analyzing immunohistochemical studies, and combining results from microarray experiments, while working with SPORE investigators to select the most appropriate design and analysis approaches for a broad array of studies. She is an affiliate investigator on the Data Management Coordination Center for the Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) and continues to work with EDRN statisticians on methods for biomarker development. In addition to these projects, her current interests include modeling the development of resistance to androgen ablation therapy.

Martin Gleave is co-leader of SPORE Project 2: Understanding and Targeting the Lineage Plasticity in the Genomic Umbrella Neoadjuvant Study (GUNS)  and is a member of the SPORE Executive Committee. He also serves as the Executive Director of the Vancouver Prostate Centre, the Chief Executive Officer of PC-TRIADD, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Urologic Sciences at UBC, and the BC Leadership Chair in Prostate Cancer Research. Dr. Gleave is a clinician-scientist and urologic surgeon, and his major research focus involves the study of cellular and molecular mechanisms mediating progression of prostate cancer to its lethal stage of androgen independence, and use of this information to develop integrated multimodality therapies that specifically target these mechanisms. Dr. Gleave established a role for clusterin as a cancer-related cell survival protein involved in treatment resistance and developed an inhibitor, designated OGX-011, which improved efficacy of hormone- and chemo-therapies in prostate and other cancer models. He is the scientific founder of OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Dr. John K. Lee is is co-leader of SPORE Project 3: Modulating Androgen Receptor Signaling to Enhance the Efficacy of CAR T Cell Therapy for Advanced Prostate Cancer.

Dr. Lee is a physician-scientist and Associate Professor-in-Residence in the Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine and the Institute for Urologic Oncology, Department of Urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He received an A.B. with highest honors in Biochemical Sciences at Harvard University and an M.D. at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth during which he participated in the HHMI-NIH Research Scholars Program. Dr. Lee completed his clinical training in internal medicine at Boston Medical Center and Specialty Training and Advanced Research (STAR) fellowship in medical oncology at UCLA where he obtained a Ph.D. from the Molecular Biology Institute under the mentorship of Dr. Owen Witte. He specializes in genitourinary oncology, specifically caring for patients with advanced prostate and bladder cancer. Dr. Lee also leads a federally funded basic and translational research laboratory within the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center focused on untangling diverse genotype-phenotype relationships in cancer and developing new immune-based strategies to effectively treat prostate cancer.

Colm Morrissey, PhD is co-director of Core B (Biospecimen and Pathology Core) of the PNW Prostate Cancer SPORE, and is a member of the SPORE Executive Committee. Dr. Morrissey serves as a research associate professor in the UW Medical School’s department of urology. His research interests include:

• Providing biospecimen infrastructure for the study of prostate cancer. These ongoing efforts have led to the development of a large serum/plasma and tissue bank that contains thousands of well documented clinical specimens, including bone and soft tissue metastases acquired through our rapid autopsy program.
• Biomarkers for the detection of prostate cancer and those useful in monitoring the clinical course of the disease. These include markers that are secreted or cell associated which could be helpful in predicting the aggressiveness of the tumor.
• The biology of prostate cancer dissemination and growth in bone, including the study of the bone microenvironment and factors which perturb normal bone remodeling and lead to the characteristic osteoblastic response.
• Identifying and developing targeted treatments for the emerging castration-resistant lethal androgen receptor-null phenotype of prostate cancer

Cancer Molecular Diagnostics Development for Precision Medicine:

A primary focus is to develop innovative molecular diagnostics for the detection of germline and somatic mutations that guide therapeutic decision making. As examples, the lab has developed and validated the “ColoSeq™” and the “UW‑OncoPlex™” assays, which are clinically available at the University of Washington. UW‑OncoPlex™ is a multiplexed next generation sequencing gene panel that detects mutations in tumor tissue in >350 genes related to cancer treatment decision making.

Dr. Pritchard’s laboratory is actively exploring noninvasive methods for sampling cancer mutations including cell‑free microRNA, cell‑free DNA, and circulating tumor cell‑associated nucleic acids. They are investigating pre‑analytic and biological variation that impact serum and plasma circulating nucleic acid biomarker measurements to inform the appropriate use and interpretation of “liquid biopsy” blood tests.

Prostate Cancer Precision Medicine:

In collaboration with members of the Pacific Northwest Prostate Cancer SPORE and the PCF/SU2C prostate cancer international dream team, Dr. Pritchard’s laboratory is working in several areas to make precision medicine a reality for men with prostate cancer. Projects include application of UW‑OncoPlex™ for men with prostate cancer, characterization of hypermutation as a predictive biomarker in advanced prostate cancer, and development of novel non‑invasive diagnostics to guide therapy in advanced disease.

Improving Diagnosis of Lynch Syndrome:

Lynch syndrome is among the most common causes of genetic predisposition to cancer, and yet it remains underdiagnosed. It is characterized by genetic defects in mismatch DNA repair genes leading to microsatellite instability (MSI) and hypermutation in tumors. Dr. Pritchard’s lab has developed methods to detect MSI and hypermutation from next generation sequencing (NGS) data. Using this technology, we developed the first ever first ever tumor‑based NGS test for Lynch syndrome (ColoSeq Tumor).

Colin Pritchard, M.D., is a co-leader of Project 1 (Molecular Predictors of Prostate Cancer Progression and Mortality).

Dr. Pritchard is director of the Genetics and Solid Tumors Laboratory at UW Medical Center, as well as a UW associate professor of Laboratory Medicine.

What excites him most about his job is the opportunity to make a positive difference in the care of cancer patients and their families. His philosophy is to take a "patients first" approach to cancer genetic testing. This means reviewing the patient's story and having frequent communication with other providers on the cancer care team in order to best tailor genetic testing results to the patient's specific scenario and needs.

Dr. Pritchard completed his medical training at the UW. His clinical work focuses on next-generation cancer risk assessment and precision treatment. Dr. Pritchard has won many awards including from the Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists and the Prostate Cancer Foundation.