The Department of Medicine at the Anschutz Medical Campus boasts top medical care for patients, as well as fellowships and endowments. The Grand Rounds Schedule includes all events for divisions under the department.

Research

The Doebele laboratory is a basic and translational research laboratory with a primary interest in the study of oncogene positive lung cancers that harbor gene fusions such as ALK, ROS1, and RET. Specifically, our laboratory is interested in mechanisms of intrinsic and acquired resistance to oncogene-targeted therapy. These targeted therapies typically yield a dramatic clinical benefit for patients, but ultimately fail due to adaptive mechanisms of the cancer cell.Our laboratory primarily utilizes cell lines harboring gene fusions to artificially induce drug resistance and to uncover cooperative signaling pathways that are important for cancer cell survival. Our laboratory also analyzes human lung cancer tissue samples to corroborate mechanisms of resistance identified in vitro or to identify novel mechanisms that cannot be easily modeled in the laboratory.Our ultimate goal is to delineate the cellular mechanisms of resistance in order to devise treatment strategies with rational drug combinations that will overcome or delay drug resistance for patients with gene fusion positive lung cancer.

1. Davies KD, Le AT, Theodoro MF, Skokan MC, Aisner DL, Berge EM, Terracciano LM, Cappuzzo F, Incarbone M, Roncalli M, Alloisio M, Santoro A, Camidge DR, Varella-Garcia M, and Doebele RC.Identifying and Targeting ROS1 Gene Fusions in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.Clin Can Research, In press.

2. Doebele, RC, Pilling AB, Aisner DL, Kutateladze TG, Le AT, Weickhardt AJ, Kondo KL, Linderman D, Heasley LE, Franklin WA, Varella-Garcia M, and Camidge DR. Mechanisms of Resistance to Crizotinib in Patients with ALK Gene Rearranged Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer. Clin Cancer Res. 2012 Mar 1;18(5):1472-82. 

3. Doebele RC, Lu X, Sumey C, Maxson DA, Weickhardt AJ, Oton AB, Bunn PA, Barón AE, Franklin WA, Aisner DL, Varella-Garcia M, and Camidge DR.Oncogene Status Predicts Patterns of Metastatic Spread in Treatment Naïve Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.Cancer. 2012 Jan 26. doi: 10.1002/cncr.27409. [Epub ahead of print]

4. Camidge DR and Doebele RC. Treating ALK positive lung cancer: Early successes and coming challenges.Nat Rev Clin Oncol. 2012 Apr 3;9(5):268-77. doi: 10.1038/nrclinonc.2012.43. PMID: 22473102.