Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
I am Chi-Ju Kim, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow in the Cancer Ecology Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. I came to the field of cancer biology accompanied by many biomedical engineering skills gained from developing microfluidic devices for liquid biopsy applications. The ultimate research and career goal is to cure cancer and improve the lives of cancer patients through the realization of personalized precision medicine. I have already made significant contributions to improving disease management, particularly for cancer, including: (i) developing fully automated devices for isolating cell-free DNA (cfDNA), extracellular vesicles (EVs), and platelets from whole blood, (ii) developing a fully automated device for a platelet function test. I am committed to pursuing a career in academic research to develop microfluidic systems for translational biomedical sciences, especially in understanding and discovering the critical mechanism leading to lethal cancer. I believes the polyaneuploid cancer cell (PACC) state is a novel mechanism that cancer cells eventually evolve into therapy-resistant cancer cells. My current research involves mapping the life history of the PACC state by investigating PACC nuclear morphology and molecular characteristics to identify what therapy-resistant cancer cells leading to cancer recurrence are critical. I am also pursuing research in the mechanism of therapeutic resistance induction at a cellular level and the impact of EVs as a mediator of these cellular communications. The combination of my Ph.D. studies in biomedical engineering with the training in cancer biology gained during my postdoctoral fellowship uniquely suits him to build my own research field, stipulated as translational biomedical research, by both proposing a novel model of cancer biology and developing a realizable microfluidic system to elucidate mechanisms of therapeutic resistance as well as metastasis.
Nuclear morphology predicts cell survival to cisplatin chemotherapy
Thursday, October 12, 2023
12:45 PM – 1:00 PM PDT