As a career research scientist, I have made efforts to diversify my basic science portfolio. I have worked extensively in organic synthesis, biochemistry, genetics, genomics, molecular and cellular biology in order to gain the comprehensive understanding of complex diseases like cancer. One of my interests is in identifying different signaling pathways that contribute in cancer growth and metastasis and to develop drug combination therapies. Another field of interest is to quantitatively measure proteins and microRNAs in clinical samples to develop novel biomarkers for identifying patients that will be at high risk of developing metastasis as well as biomarkers that will be useful in identifying patients that will be either resistant or sensitive to a specific treatment regimen. Furthermore the cellular model systems (2D and 3D) that my group is developing can also be used to better predict treatment to therapy. We have developed two novel methods to culture primary tumors with an ultimate goal of recapitulating primary human cancers to better understand the biology of cancer initiation, progression and metastasis; identify novel drug targets and de novo and acquired resistance to drugs. Our goal is to utilize these systems to identify novel drug combinations for personalizing a clinical regimen for each patient based on the response(s) of their own tumor cells. The first of these methods involves the growth of cancer cells in 3D directly from biopsies or fine needle aspirates from cancer patients that are enriched in stem cell like properties. The second method is to grow, expand and maintain primary cell cultures derived directly from patient's tissues samples (biopsies and fine needle aspirates) using feeder cells and the ROCK inhibitor. The cancers we are focusing on are those of the salivary gland, brain and breast and melanoma. Recently my group has established a platform for isolating, enriching, and short-term propagation of circulating tumor cells from individual patients. This cellular model relies solely on cell behavior and is a non-biased method that can be widely applied to all tumor types as it does not require specific biomarkers. In addition, my laboratory has established a scalable, rapid, and robust methods that can provide routine access to invasive metastatic cells using combined platforms of in vivo (zebrafish) and in vitro cell line model. These technologies have the potential to identify novel metastasis-specific drug targets and drugs.