Pradipta Ghosh, MD

Dr. Ghosh is a physician-scientist, biochemist and cellular and molecular biologist who focuses on fundamental mechanisms of signal transduction in physiology, and how they are altered in disease. She and her team of investigators at the UC San Diego Institute for Network Medicine (iNetMed) have generated computational models of cancer initiation and progression in the esophagus, stomach and the gastroesophageal junction and pre-clinical multidimensional human adult stem cell-based disease models that recapitulate human disease-in-a-dish. The computational algorithms (administered through the Center for Precision Computational Network, PreCSN) and disease-modeling approaches (administered through the HUMANOID^TM Center of Research Excellence) of iNetMed represent off-the-beaten-path approaches that are geared to not just identify disease continuum states that are missed by traditional approaches, but also to identify animal models based on their ‘humanness’, and prioritize biomarkers and drug targets that are expected to retain relevance and utility across patients within each disease area regardless of the disease heterogeneity. By applying these approaches to the area of foregut cancers, Dr. Ghosh and colleagues seek to reduce the translational gap that currently plagues the process of drug discovery.