Dr. Eliza Fong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the National University of Singapore with joint appointment at the N.1 Institute for Health. Through her Translational Tumor Engineering (TTE) program, Dr. Fong hopes to change the way cancer patients are currently treated. Most cancer patients do not receive individualized drug treatment regimes. Rather, they receive ‘standard-of-care’ regimens where they are treated with drugs that are known to ‘work’ for a general cohort of patients with the same cancer type. Using biomaterials engineering strategies, Dr. Fong develops platforms to grow patient tumor tissues (organoids and explants) outside the body, so that these engineered tumor tissues can be used to better test drugs and identify the best drug regimen for individual patients. Dr. Fong also looks at recapitulating stromal heterogeneity in these engineered models to enable the discovery of potential new targets in the tumor microenvironment. They can be found on Twitter @elizafongls.
Read Eliza’s Emerging Investigator article “Hydrogels to engineer tumor microenvironments in vitro” and check out all of the 2021 Biomaterials Science Emerging Investigator articles here.
