Cancer treatment is rarely one-size-fits-all. What works for one patient may not work for another—and understanding how each person’s cancer responds to therapy is a major challenge in medicine.

Dr. Thomas Zangle, Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Utah, is working to change that. With support from an Ascender Grant, he and his team are developing new tools that could help doctors better predict how cancer will react to certain treatments—specifically in cases of melanoma, a serious form of skin cancer.

“Our broader goal is to enable precision oncology by providing patient specific predictions of drug response or resistance to help oncologists choose the right therapy for individual patients,” said Zangle.

His lab focuses on a special type of imaging known as quadrant darkfield microscopy. Unlike traditional methods that rely on chemical labels to highlight structures inside cells, this technique allows researchers to see subcellular features—like melanosomes, the pigment-filled parts of skin cells—without interfering with how the cells behave.

The Ascender Grant program via the U’s Technology Licensing Office provides funding to help University of Utah researchers bridge the critical gap between research discoveries and market-ready innovations. Designed for technologies with strong commercial potential, Ascender Grants support activities like prototype development, market validation, and scalability testing to attract entrepreneurs, investors, and licensees.

“This grant supports our research into new microscopy methods to monitor melanoma cell response to therapy,” Zangle said.

The ability to track these melanosomes is important because they may hold clues about how melanoma progresses or how it resists treatment. Zangle’s work could help researchers and doctors understand these changes earlier and more clearly.

“This Ascender grant will support investigation of improvements to this method, such as sizing intracellular particles or application to understand melanoma and pigmentation dynamics more broadly,” he said.

Dr. Zangle’s research is made stronger through collaborations with experts in melanoma biology, data visualization, and pigmentation. He credits partners at Huntsman Cancer Institute, the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, and Ohio State University for expanding the reach of this work.

“Each of these collaborations has enabled or expanded the scope of our work,” he said.

What’s next? Zangle hopes to continue improving the technology while using it to answer deeper questions about melanoma and treatment resistance.

“We hope to use this method to understand how melanosomes develop during melanoma progression, and how this can be used to indicate acquired resistance to cancer therapies,” he said.

In the long run, this research could support more personalized, effective treatment plans—and improve how cancer is understood and treated.

“This research will help develop new methods to enable precision oncology by predicting resistance to available cancer therapies,” Zangle said.

To learn more about this research, please contact Dr. Zangle.  📧

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