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2023 Recipient — Antonio Delgado-Gonzalez, PhD

Antonio Delgado Gonzalez headshot, smiling, in front of computer

Antonio Delgado-Gonzalez, PhD

Mapping the Spatial Proteomic Landscape of Ovarian Tumors

Project Summary

High-grade serous ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecologic malignancy associated with a disproportionately large number of deaths. Most women are diagnosed with high stage by which time tumors consist of complex mixtures of different cell types making curative treatment challenging. Standard of care is surgical debulking followed by platinum-based chemotherapy. Unfortunately for most patients the disease recurs within 5 years with a tumor that is resistant to platinum. The goals of this proposal are to determine which cell types have a key role in ovarian tumor growth and progression and which cell types will be killed or survive chemotherapy. To accomplish our goals, we will use a new microscope-based technology called CODEX (CODetection by indEXing) combined with sophisticated computational tools that allow us to study the biology of high-grade serous ovarian tumors in unprecedented detail by imaging these tumors and characterizing the individual cells that make-up each individual tumor. This permits not only the detailed characterization of hundreds of thousands of single cells but also their location to neighboring cells within the tumor section. An important part of the design of this proposal is to image ovarian tumors where the response to chemotherapy is known. We predict that CODEX will allow us to link the occurrence of certain cell types within ovarian tumors with response to chemotherapy and thus have predictive significance.

This grant was made possible in part by a generous donation from The Wasily Family Foundation.

Bio

Dr. Antonio Delgado-Gonzalez is a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Garry P. Nolan under the mentorship of Dr. Wendy J. Fantl at Stanford University. His research interest lies in generating a systems-level view of ovarian cancer to develop spatial biomarkers to predict response to chemotherapy, and to identify novel therapeutic targets. Dr. Delgado-Gonzalez obtained his BSc in Pharmacy in 2014, his MSc in Molecular Biology in 2015, and his PhD in Biomedicine in 2019 from the University of Granada, Spain, under the supervision of Dr. Rosario M. Sanchez-Martin and Dr. Juan J. Diaz-Mochon. His graduate studies integrated nanotechnology with chemical approaches to develop biocompatible reagents with cellular and molecular applications, such as biomarker identification and cellular barcoding. In 2021, he joined the lab of Dr. Fantl as an Alfonso Martin Escudero postdoctoral fellow to study the tumor microenvironment (TME) of tubo-ovarian high-grade serous carcinoma (HGSC). His current work applies CODetection by indEXing, a recently developed multiplex imaging platform, to gain a comprehensive understanding of the cell types and their spatial interactions (cellular neighborhoods) within the HGSC TME. With OCRA’s Mentored Investigator Grant support, Dr. Delgado-Gonzalez will determine how cellular neighborhoods within the HGSC TME compare across anatomical sites and how they change in response to carboplatin. These studies will provide new insights into HGSC tumor biology with the potential to identify new biomarkers and therapeutic targets to predict response and overcome resistance to carboplatin respectively.