Dowlati Lab

The Dowlati research lab at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center is led by Dr. Afshin Dowlati, MD. His expertise lies in both the biology and clinical management of thoracic malignancies. He has led the thoracic program at CWRU since 2000. His research is focused on translational aspects of target validation and drug development. He is uniquely positioned to perform preclinical studies of novel drugs in cancer models with an eventual goal of taking them into the clinic. A major effort of the Dowlati research lab is to identify novel therapeutics for small cell lung cancer (SCLC). There has been little progress in the clinical management of this disease over the last three decades, due largely to limited knowledge about the underlying mechanisms driving this malignancy. We intend to use cell line and mouse models of SCLC to study the role of genomic mutations in SCLC and to generate preclinical data to support future clinical trial applications.