07/24/2026
From Seed Money to Breakthrough: Priya Dedhia, MD, PhD, Shares her story -
“Every Discovery Starts and Ends With the Patient
This work began with one patient. Early in my career, I cared for a young woman with adrenal cancer, a rare and aggressive cancer of the adrenal gland. There were no effective treatment options to offer. The treatments we could offer failed for most patients. That experience set the direction of my entire research program. Today, my laboratory takes tumor tissue donated by patients at the time of surgery and grows it into living, three-dimensional “mini-tumors.” These models behave much like the original tumor, so we can study each patient’s cancer and test drugs on it directly. Using these mini-tumors, we read the genetic instructions inside thousands of individual tumor cells. That work uncovered a hidden group of cancer cells that divide rapidly and depend on a specific DNA repair system to survive. These findings indicate a real weakness in the tumor, and they point to drugs that can exploit that weakness.
We are now turning that weakness into treatment. We are tested drugs that block the repair system these cells rely on. In our lab models, these drugs slowed tumor growth and extended survival. Our next step, developed with our medical oncology partners, is a clinical trial that will offer this approach to patients with advanced ACC. The impact reaches beyond one disease. Rare cancers are often overlooked because they affect too few people to attract drug development, and patients are too scattered to fill large trials. The approach we have built helps solve that problem. A patient’s own tumor becomes the testing ground, so a small number of samples can still reveal what a drug will do. Each discovery moves us closer to giving the next young patient hope and a chance at a cure.”
❤️🎗️🩶
