Duke University
Durham, North Carolina, United States
I am Kenan Zhang MD, PhD, a postdoctoral associate with Dr. Mustafa Khasraw in the Department of Neurosurgery at Duke University. I am a licensed neurosurgeon from China and trained as a physician-scientist.
I am interested in molecular pathological classification-based treatment investigation for diffuse glioma. My Ph.D. work was focused on molecular classification-based glioma research. Specifically, I participated in the construction of the world's largest diffuse glioma multiomics database, the Chinese Glioma Genome Atlas (CGGA), and led the application of molecular pathological classification into the cohort. Further, I probed into the role of MET fusions and structure variants in diffuse glioma and revealed their adverse prognostic role in diffuse glioma, the predictive role for the MET inhibitor precision therapy, and the diagnostic role for high-grade astrocytoma.
As a postdoc, I am led by Dr. Mustafa Khasraw to the immunotherapy for diffuse glioma, working on discerning the immunogenic tumor neoantigen - TCR pairs and investigating the spatial transcriptome profiles. Our goal is to challenge the accepted paradigms, understand biologically relevant glioma-immune interactions, and develop new feasible immune therapies. Our work will apply to a large cohort of patients with diffuse glioma and make a difference.
