Dr. Walaa Kattan

Dr. Kattan obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Life Sciences at Alfaisal University in 2015 after which she completed a Cancer Biology-Clinical & Translational Oncology PhD degree from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Houston, TX focusing on drug/target discovery in pancreatic cancer. Her PhD work focused on discovering alternative mechanisms of inhibiting the oncoprotein KRAS which is mutated in ~25% of cancers, and in more than 90% of Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC). This work resulted in the discovery of a number of novel therapeutic targets in KRAS-driven cancers published in Nature Communications, PNAS and Life Science Alliance.

In recent years, several studies measuring expression phenotypes using bulk or single-cell RNA-seq of PDAC tumors have identified prognostically-relevant transcriptional states: the more aggressive basal state and the less aggressive classical one. Our single-cell RNA sequencing data from primary tumor biopsies have revealed that both states can coexist in one tumor and longitudinal monitoring of patient-derived organoids (PDOs) has proven that cancer cells harbor plasticity whereby they can shift from one state to another as the surrounding environment changes (Raghavan et al. 2021 Cell). Importantly, cell state impacts therapeutic response: cells environmentally shifted into the classical state are more sensitive to chemotherapy while cells environmentally shifted into the basal state are more sensitive to targeted therapies such as MEK inhibitors. Thus, I am currently working on:

KACST