Transforming health care through personalized medicine

Early detection of cancer saves lives, yet an estimated 50% of cancers are discovered at an advanced stage, when it is harder to successfully treat. At the Biodesign Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics, researchers are developing promising new screening strategies, such as cancer detection through biomarkers — unique molecular footprints of disease — which can provide lifesaving early warning signals.  

Because each person is unique, health care’s traditional “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work for everyone. To address this challenge, the center taps into the latest capabilities of personalized medicine, an emerging field with potential to improve patient treatments and outcomes by factoring in an individual’s unique genetic and metabolic profile. Beyond cancer, researchers are delving into the earlier and more accurate diagnosis of infectious and autoimmune diseases, among others.  

The goal is to treat patients with greater precision — and greater success.  

The center’s innovative approach to health solutions draws from the overarching mission of the Biodesign Institute, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary throughout 2024. LaBaer, one of the nation’s foremost investigators in the field of personalized diagnostics, also serves as executive director of the institute.   

Below, he shares his insights into the center’s research. Answers are edited for length and clarity.  

Question: What is the research focus of your center?

Answer: Our focus is developing advanced diagnostic tools for the earlier, more accurate diagnosis of disease, leveraging the latest capabilities of personalized medicine. The completion of the human genome project in 2001 opened the floodgates to a deeper understanding of medicine, dramatically accelerating the pace of biological research.  

Q: Why is this work important to society?

A: In the future, we will look back at our current list of illnesses as gross oversimplifications. Already, in our modern era of molecular medicine, we are learning that what we’ve classified as single diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease or breast cancer, include many different molecular variations, each with a different root cause, prognosis and response to specific therapies. Our lab hopes to help develop new diagnostic tools that pinpoint the specific molecular disease for each patient and direct physicians to the right therapeutic strategy for that individual. 

Q: How did you become interested in science, and in particular, the field you are in?

A: I’ve always enjoyed science, even back in high school. When I went to college, I initially imagined becoming a doctor or a lawyer. I quickly decided I wasn’t good with conflict, so I was better off in medicine. In my sophomore year I took honors organic chemistry. In the class we did a different step of a synthesis every week to create a compound. When the professor explained at the beginning of the course that we were going to do something that had never been done before, it really blew my mind. The bug bit me hard — the idea of being able to do something for the first time to discover something new. From then on, I knew I had to do research. I shifted from doing straight medical school to earning an MD PhD.  

Q: You earned a medical degree and doctorate in biochemistry and physics from the University of California, San Francisco, and later completed a medical residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and clinical fellowship in oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, both in Boston. How do you compare the rewards of caring for patients versus doing research?  

A: I loved caring for patients, but research has always been what I loved the most. When you’re a doctor, you can care for the patients you have, but when you’re a researcher, your discoveries could affect thousands of people.  

As scientists, we live in a very privileged place. We stand at the edge of human knowledge and look into the darkness of the unknown. And we can say, “I’m going to be the person to shed light on that.”   

Q: What is the most fun aspect of your work in the center?

A: Solving puzzles in research is definitely rewarding, but training young students is also very rewarding. It’s really lovely to be able to work with young graduate students or postdoctoral fellows and help shape their careers and training, teaching them how to ask the right questions and come up with creative solutions.  

Q: What is your favorite thing about working at Biodesign?

A: This is a wonderful environment with brilliant, thoughtful and creative scientists who have a wonderful spirit of collaboration. We’re very blessed to be surrounded by smart people who want to work and solve problems together and who are dedicated to making a difference.  

Q: Please describe your experience with the collaborative and interdisciplinary research culture at the Biodesign Institute.

A: Biodesign is not only dedicated to transdisciplinary science, but it’s hardwired into the Institute. Biodesign is organized into centers that are specifically designed to address a question or problem. For example, at the Center for Personalized Diagnostics we have biologists, molecular biologists, biochemists, software engineers, mechanical engineers and clinical informaticians all working on the early detection of disease and innovative ways to diagnose illness. One of the most fun aspects of being at Biodesign is hearing the many different scientific languages spoken and learning how to understand each other’s languages so we can work together to solve big challenges. You don’t find that often elsewhere — most university research still follows the old departmental model.    

Q: What is the biggest challenge in this field of research?

A: Personalized medicine relies on novel therapeutics that are tailored to treat the specific molecular causes of each individual disease. Academic and pharmaceutical company laboratories are working hard at defining these individual pathways. Personalized medicine also relies on diagnostic tools to quickly identify the specific disease an individual has and which treatment is appropriate. A specific therapy only makes sense if there is a test to tell patients if they will benefit from it. 

Q: How are students involved in your research?

A: Our projects engage a wide range of academic disciplines —molecular biology, biochemistry, software engineering, informatics, medicine, chemical engineering, cell biology, database development and robotics — to understand the functions of proteins and how they dysfunction in disease. Students in any of these fields are welcome to talk with us about joining our center. We engage volunteers and paid undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs. 

Q: What is something you consider one of the center’s biggest successes?

A: When the virus SARS-CoV-2 appeared in Arizona, we sprang into action to protect our community. We partnered with the state of Arizona to provide more than 40 public testing sites statewide. Our researchers pivoted our automated diagnostic technology originally developed to detect radiation exposure to a new target: coronavirus genetic markers. We quickly built a clinically approved, CLIA-certified COVID-19 testing center that provided results within about 48 hours. Another success was our ASU Biodesign Clinical Testing Lab was the first lab in the western United States to offer widely available public saliva testing to identify the presence of COVID-19. 

Q: Has your teaching and mentorship helped inform your research and if so, in what ways?

A: One of the best parts of teaching is having to clarify in your own mind how something works so clearly that you can explain it to someone else. That’s true when I teach graduate students and postdocs in my lab and in my class, Biochemistry of Cancer, where we don’t use a textbook, we use original scientific literature. Part of the course is teaching students how to read that literature, but one of the joys of the course for me is that every year students pick different articles to talk about. So I'm constantly being challenged with new articles, ideas and approaches that I’ve read and learned about. And so, I'm constantly educating myself. I’ve always wanted a job where I could always grow in my career, and that's the beauty about being both a scientist and a professor.