ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024

As a tenure-track surgeon-scientist, Priya Harakh Dedhia, MD, PhD treats patients with aggressive endocrine cancers. The overarching goal of her research is to study disease progression and identify precision oncology therapies to improve endocrine cancer outcomes. To pursue this vision, she delved into translational undergraduate research at Brown University, then obtained her MD and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. During her doctoral research, she used cell lines and mouse models to study the molecular mechanisms of oncogenesis in acute myeloid leukemia in Warren Pear’s lab. In General Surgery residency at the University of Michigan, she interacted with patients and realized that although cell lines and mice form the backbone of preclinical research, they often cannot recapitulate the broad spectrum of human disease or patient-specific responses to treatment. Because of this, she joined the lab of Jason Spence, where she learned to generate organoid models from primary patient tissue.

Upon joining OSU, the first patient Dr. Dedhia operated on had adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC), and she was devastated by the effects of this disease. To address the lack of models reflecting ACC complexity, her lab established ACC patient- derived tumor organoids (PTOs), which recapitulate patient-specific features of disease. Supported by foundation and government awards, the lab identified potential drivers of ACC progression using single cell RNA sequencing, which are now being targeted in ACC PTOs. In similar studies, the lab is also targeting drivers of metastasis in medullary thyroid cancer by pairing MTC PTOs with an in vitro metastasis-on-a-chip platform. Ultimately, Dr. Dedhia’s lab hopes to accelerate discoveries in endocrine cancer therapies.