.jpg "Pankita H. Pandya, PhD photo")
Assistant Research Professor
Indiana University
I am an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine. My research initiatives focus on development of novel, personalized therapies for pediatric and adolescents as well as young adults (AYA) sarcomas via my training in precision genomics and humanized in vivo modeling approaches. While advancements in pediatric cancer drug development and therapeutic interventions have been on the rise, the prognosis for pediatric patients at high risk for disease progression still remains dismal. Notably, pediatric sarcomas such as Osteosarcoma, Ewing Sarcoma, and Rhabdomyosarcoma result in relapse-related progressive disease due the tumor’s ability to develop resistance to anti-cancer therapies. With advancements in high-throughput sequencing and –omics approaches, it is evident that the complex genetic landscape of pediatric and AYA sarcomas will not be cured by interrogation and targeting of a single gene, protein or pathway. Rather, these next-generation sequencing technologies have highlighted the importance of assessing altered biological networks and multiple cellular process for identification of novel combination therapies. Additionally, a “deep dive” into an individual patient’s genome may hold the key for improving therapeutic outcomes. Such a holistic approach for discovery and interrogation of therapeutic biomarkers will enable stratification of therapeutic responder vs non-responder patient populations that can generate new testable hypotheses for sarcomas. Thus, my research efforts have concentrated on utilizing systems biology approach for identifying the overlap and connecting the bioinformatics-based large-scale genomic findings with clinically defined prognostic/predictive molecular biomarkers involving pathways, such as cell cycle regulation via CDK4/6, replication stress and epigenetic-based therapeutic resistance mechanisms for preclinical functional validation using in vivo pediatric and AYA sarcoma models. Investigating and targeting such mechanisms could significantly impact the dismal prognosis we see in pediatric and AYA patients with relapsed/recurrent sarcomas.