Beating cancer…again

Assistant Professor Shruti BHATT from the Department of Pharmacy received the American Society of Hematology Global Research Award in July 2021. This award recognises the contributions of international scientific leaders in the field of hematology and supports their scientific careers as young investigators.

Dr Bhatt’s laboratory adopts functional and genomic approaches to understand the complex process of evolution of resistance to cancer therapy. This is a long-standing problem in cancer treatment. While most patients respond to current treatment standards for acute leukemia, many of them relapse within six months. Dr Bhatt utilises patient-derived xenograft models and DNA-barcoding along with single-cell RNA-sequencing to track individual cancer cells in the presence of clinically-active therapy, so as to construct lineage trees for the evolution of resistant clones.

Her laboratory also utilises a unique functional approach to precision medicine called BH3 profiling that measures cancer cells’ ability to undergo cell death early in response to therapy. She is currently identifying clinical responders to targeted therapy, in collaboration with clinical investigators at NUH (National University Hospital) and SGH (Singapore General Hospital).

She says, “Our ultimate goal is to design biomarker-driven clinical trials where predictions made from BH3 profiling will be used to assign patients on treatment arms, specifically relapsed tumours, for which there are limited treatment options.”

Dr Bhatt was also recently selected as an American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Nextgen Star, with an invitation to speak at the annual AACR meeting for early-career investigators.

Congratulations, Dr Bhatt!