Anuradha Budhu

Anuradha Budhu, Ph.D. Anuradha Budhu, Ph.D., heads a research team at the National Cancer Institute that recently  uncovered an imbalance between saturated and unsaturated fats (such as palmitic or fatty acids) that occur in patients with a common liver cancer called hepatocellular carcinoma, or HCC. Budhu’s team also determined that HCC patients with high unsaturated fat levels had poor survival rates, suggesting that a shift of balance toward saturated fats may be a novel therapeutic strategy in the treatment of aggressive liver cancer. Budhu, who earned her doctorate at Cornell University, is a staff scientist at NCI’s Center for Cancer Research. She has been awarded CCR’s outstanding postdoctoral award as well as the NCI Director’s Innovation Award. She has been in the Laboratory of Human Carcinogenesis since 2002 working to uncover molecular and genomic targets associated with liver cancer and its metastasis. Using these techniques in a unique way, she and her colleagues were able to link fatty acids with HCC patient outcome. Past studies on HCC focused on the roles of either genes or metabolites, which are byproducts of metabolism such as fatty acids. Budhu’s group was the first to interweave these two distinct platforms to search for the key molecular drivers of HCC. As a result, they uncovered a set of cellular alterations in fat signaling pathways associated with HCC and discovered that an important transmitter of fatty acid flow—a gene called stearoyl ...
Source: NCI Benchmarks - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Tags: cancer Source Type: news