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Tanner - 2026

Mentor: Kandice Tanner, PhD | tannerkd@mail.nih.gov
Lab
Tissue Morphodynamics Section, Lab of Cell Biology
NCI

Brain metastases are among the most devastating complications of cancer, associated with high mortality, severe neurological impairment, and limited therapeutic options due to poor drug penetration and rapid emergence of treatment resistance. This project leverages larval zebrafish as a high-throughput, in vivo platform to study brain metastasis at the systems level. Rather than evaluating drug response as a purely biochemical process, the work integrates mechanical properties of the brain microenvironment with chemical perturbations to understand how mechano-chemical cues jointly regulate therapeutic efficacy. Using live imaging and quantitative analysis, the project will generate response landscapes that link tissue context, cellular behavior, and drug performance. These data will be used to identify design principles for more effective, context-aware cancer therapies that account for both physical and molecular constraints present in vivo.

Skills gained include: in vivo experimental design, fluorescence microscopy, quantitative image analysis, high-throughput screening workflows, multidimensional parameter mapping, and data-driven modeling of biological response landscapes.