Andi Cani

Dr. Andi Cani, PhD, is an early-career research faculty member in the Breast Oncology Group of the Division of Hematology and Oncolgy at the Department of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan Medical School. His primary research interest is to investigate cancer molecular evolution by liquid biopsies in order to elucidate the mechanisms of response and resistance to therapies with the goal of enabling real-time adjustment of traditional, precision, and immunotherapies with improved outcomes. Dr. Cani's training and semi-independent work has been funded by internal, NIH, and foundation grants resulting in numerous and high-impact publications including 33 peer-reviewed articles and an H-index of 21.

A tumor tissue biopsy is unfeasible for monitoring tumor evolution and represents one local area of a single lesion. Liquid biopsies like circulating, cell-free tumor DNA (ctDNA), have revolutionized non-invasive disease monitoring representing the entire disease, and can detect some targetable emerging driver mutations. Inclusion of single-cell analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTC), which are whole, intact cancer cells isolated from blood, promises to provide more complex, multi-omic information that may reveal the evolving landscape of a patient's cancer in real time. Dr. Cani has perfected single-CTC genomic profiling for the detection of targetable precision and immuno-oncology alterations, and has made considerable progress into single-CTC transcriptomic profiling. Together with the analysis of additional single-CTC omics approaches, in combination with tissue and ctDNA, and synergizing with the rich pipeline of molecularly informed therapies in the near future, his goal is to develop a platform that monitors the tumor molecular evolution for emerging resistance mechanisms and treatment strategies. This strategy can be tested in prospective interventional precision/immuno-oncology trials in patients with CTC-rich metastatic tumors like those of the breast, prostate, and others.