Dr. Brenner is an associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Department of Pharmacology and Center for Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics. He is also a member of the U-M Rogel Cancer Center and serves as director of the U-M Program in Cellular and Molecular Biology, the Otolaryngolocy Clinical Laboratory (CLIA) and the Head & Neck Oncology Progam. His research lab, the Michigan Otolaryngology and Translational Oncology lab (MiOTO), aims to identify new diagnostic tests and precision medicine therapies for cancer patients. More recently, Dr. Brenner has developed blood and urine-based liquid biopsy tests that are used to support the clinical management of head and neck cancer patients.

In addition to receiving his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan, Brenner also received a master's in engineering in bioelectrical engineering and a doctorate in cellular and molecular biology for his contributions to molecular mechanisms of prostate cancer progression and therapeutic inhibition of the disease.

One goal of my research program is to advance therapeutic approaches that improve the overall survival of patients with head and neck cancers. As the catalog of molecular networks that drive cancer progression is being rapidly established by our lab and others, in order to advance new precision paradigms, we use genetic engineering and functional genomics approaches to understand cancer vulnerabilities associated with recurrent genetic networks.

The second goal of my research program is to develop tools to rapidly adapt therapy for individual patients as a strategy to improve clinical outcomes. This line of research focuses on changing longstanding clinical paradigms to enable new adaptive intervention strategies. To do this, my team is working to develop real-time tumor monitoring approaches that leverage circulating biomarkers to detect and monitor cancer. We are focused on developing at-home urine-based tests capable of early detection of cancer, real time monitoring of response to therapy and early detection of recurrence.

An additional goal of my research program is to discover combination strategies capable of improving the clinical responses to immunotherapy. While inhibition of immune checkpoint proteins has improved long term response and occasionally cured some head and neck patients, effective responses occur in only 15% of patients. The goal of this research project is to understand how precision-guided therapies can be used to modulate tumor-immune cell interactions and improve the responses of head and neck cancer patients to checkpoint blockade.