Genomic approaches to personalizing cancer diagnosis and treatment 

Sara Cooper has long been fascinated by the idea that our genetics influence our health and our bodies. She and her team in the Sara Cooper lab at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology use genetic and genomic tools to study cancer, with the ultimate goal of helping improve cancer diagnosis and personalize cancer treatment. The lab is particularly focused on breast, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers.

“There’s so much we don’t know about human health,” says Cooper. “I chose to study cancer because there is such great potential for genomic technology to influence patient care and a huge need for new treatments and diagnostic tools in oncology.”

In her work, Cooper is dedicated to unraveling the mysteries behind cancer chemotherapy resistance and discovering new gene candidates and risk factors of chemoresistance. She and her lab also use new and emerging genomic technologies to identify gene targets to help develop new therapeutic treatments for cancer.

The end goal of this work is to understand the genes and pathways important in cancer development and progression in order to improve cancer treatments. But it is the impact on people that ultimately inspires Cooper’s work.

“The problems we’re trying to tackle are very personal,” Cooper says. “When I see my friends and family facing cancer, it makes me feel ever so slightly better to say I’m working on solving it. I’m proud of what I do.”

Cooper joined HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in 2010. She completed undergraduate work in genetics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, received her PhD in genetics from Stanford University in 2006, and completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2010. Cooper also leads the Institute’s Information is Power community outreach effort.