Sammy Ferri-Borgogno

It has been my personal vision and mission in my research career to understand how cancer biology, -omics technologies and immunology might be integrated to facilitate the understanding of host-tumor responses and identifying new diagnostic and predictive biomarkers, as well as therapeutic targets. My laboratory focus on exploring the mechanisms by which the tumor microenvironment (TME) modulates tumor progression, overall survival rates and chemoresistance in ovarian cancer patients by characterizing the spatial relationships of various cell types in the ovarian TME and how its in-depth characterization could lead to the discovery of new targetable cross-talk signaling networks to be used in combination with current chemo- and immuno-therapy regimens. To accomplish this, the laboratory generated different spatial multi-omics pipelines utilizing various spatially resolved omics platforms, which allow fully characterization of mRNA, proteins, metabolites, lipids, and 40+ different phenotypically and functionally-characterized cell types. This multi-omics pipeline includes the use and the integration of techniques including imaging mass cytometry (IMC), spatial transcriptomics (ST), mass spectrometry imaging (MSI), Opal multiplex immunofluorescent and multiplex in-situ hybridization techniques, which allow us to characterize the ovarian TME with an unprecedented level of details and from multiple aspects which will ultimately help to identify and subsequently validate new targetable pathways.