The lab of tumor chemosensitivity aims to implement novel tests for the support of personalized cancer therapy in Costa Rica, including the in vitro chemosensitiviy assay of cultured primary tumors (ATP-TCA) and the test for malignant transformation by the integration of human papiloma virus (HPV). Also, we perform basic research to explore the connections of the sphingolipid pathway to sensitivity or resistance of cancer cells to chemotherapy using mathematical modeling to evaluate their potential as sensors of chemosensitivity with single cell resolution to tackle cancer complexity and heterogeneity.

The lab also established a pipeline of experimental protocols to study cell death subroutines and the role of autophagy in different models of cell death including chemotherapy on breast/brain/colon cancer and the infection of Dengue/Zika virus. To achieve this we develop molecular sensors in sorted stable cell lines to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in live microscopy-based experiments that we analyze by developing advanced image analysis pipelines.

The experimental data generated is input for the parameter estimation of complex mathematical models.

To achieve this, we developed a biocomputational platform to study large-scale networks of gene regulation mediated by transcription factors and miRNAs of the different projects, with a particular focus on the characterization of gene dosage compensation in aneuploid cancer..