超越肤浅，到分子水平

肯尼斯仔没有制定一个关于皮肤的生物好奇心，直到在医学上学迟到。

What piqued his interest was realizing that every disease process plaguing the body also occurs in the skin — including genetic disorders; cancer; autoimmunity, inflammatory and infectious diseases; and interactions with environmental exposures.

“和许多人一样，我有那些接近我受癌症影响的，说：”仔，医学博士，博士，助理教授MD安德森’s皮肤科andImmunologydepartments. “Therefore, it’s an important problem to me personally, as well as a vexing problem scientifically.”

As a dermatologist and dermatopathologist, Tsai has set his sights on preventing squamous cell carcinoma — the second most common form of skin cancer in the United States — by closely monitoring its molecular progression from normal skin to precancerous lesions and eventually to skin cancer.

“Researchers are successfully using genomics to understand and treat metastatic cancers,” Tsai says. “I want to use this kind of approach to develop a new model of targeted therapies that will prevent or reverse the skin damage that ultimately leads to skin cancer.”

Tsai and his team examine matched samples from patients and couple this with work in mouse models to identify the most significant alterations in the genomes of cells as they progress from normal skin to invasive cancer. These alterations lead to molecular changes in damaged or precancerous cells that will serve as drug targets, thus enabling interventions designed to prevent further progression to cancer.

Tsai’s research originally was funded by a seed grant from the邓肯家庭研究所癌症预防和风险评估withinMD安德森's癌症预防和人口科学师。

“Molecularly targeted cancer prevention is quite feasible and achievable,” Tsai says. “If we can identify the molecular events that drive the progression of cancer, we can then target the right vulnerabilities to interrupt the progression sequence, stopping skin cancer in its tracks.”