Dr. Valvezan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a member of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
The Valvezan laboratory is determining how metabolic networks are coordinated to promote cell growth in physiological and disease states, and how to leverage that understanding to exploit metabolic vulnerabilities in cancer. While oncogenic driver mutations can confer a growth advantage by uncoupling anabolic outputs from their normal regulatory inputs, this can come at the cost of reduced plasticity and increased dependence on specific nutrients, enzymes or pathways to sustain growth and viability. Thus the uniquely reprogrammed metabolic networks in cancer cells offer an opportunity to identify and target metabolic processes that may be uniquely essential in those cells.
The lab combines metabolomics, metabolic flux analysis, expression profiling, and mechanistic studies to gain a comprehensive understanding of how signaling pathways and oncogenic mutations remodel cellular metabolism, with the long-term goal of identifying unique cancer dependencies that can be translated into new therapeutic approaches.