About Us

Research Focus

The Kuhn laboratory is aimed at integrating patient, model system, and high-content single cell data to translate clinically observed correlations into a mechanistic understanding of the physical and biological underpinnings of cancer dynamics. The organizing framework of the physical dynamics of cancer at the lab will focus on the spatial distributions and temporal evolution of the disease at the cellular, human, and population scale.

Three complementary research projects, supported by one shared resource core, address the laboratory’s aims of

1) developing a quantitative description of the transition between limited and disseminated cancer,
2) demarcating the complexity and alterations over time of a cancer in all its phases, and
3) describing the temporal evolution of disease in patients with poor prognosis vs favorable prognosis.

The Kuhn laboratory has built and will continue to build a larger collaborative network to disseminate its capabilities and to collaborate on evolving physical sciences concepts that could address specific challenges as part of the organizing framework within the lab and the scientific community at large. Solving the problems associated with the currently imperfect performance of our therapeutic interventions and making real improvements in patient outcomes requires the understanding of the disease as a dynamical system undergoing constant transitions in both time and space, using tools from both the biological and physical sciences realms.