Research Interests
The primary research interest in Dr. Telleria’s laboratory is in the field of ovarian cancer biology and preclinical therapy. Ovarian cancer is a deadly disease mostly because is diagnosed when the tumor has already invaded the peritoneal cavity. Diagnosed patients undergo surgery and platinum-based chemotherapy. This standard of care is initially effective, leading to disease remission for about two years in the standard responder. Ultimately, however, the disease recurs and no longer responds to previous therapy. Therefore, novel therapies for ovarian cancer are desperately needed. The overall approach in Dr. Telleria’s lab to develop new potential treatments for this disease is to consider that the time between remission and recurrence can be exploited by using a chronic intervention to maintain residual ovarian cancer cells, which had escaped initial therapy, in a non-proliferative or dormant status, and/or prevent their awakening. Within this scope, current investigations are tailored to understand the pathobiology of ovarian cancer within the microenvironment of the peritoneal cavity, to study the molecular mechanisms driving dormancy of cancer cells that had survived chemotherapy, and to exploit protein homeostasis to develop therapies for non-dividing cancer cells.