Luke Gilbert, PhD
About Luke Gilbert, PhD
Luke Gilbert joined UCSF in April 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Urology and Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. The Gilbert lab uses innovative new CRISPR technologies to systematically edit the epigenome and transcriptome of cancer cells enabling us to model how principles of oncogene and non-oncogene addiction as well as tumor heterogeneity dictate drug response in cancer therapy. Dr. Gilbert’s training in cancer biology, synthetic biology and functional genomics has provided a unique intellectual and technical framework to study cancer cell response to therapy.
As a graduate student at MIT, he used a mouse model of an aggressive B-cell lymphoma to define how stromal cells in the tumor microenvironment modulate disease progression and drug response. Minimal residual disease following cancer therapy is a poorly understood clinical reality that is correlated with poor prognosis. His work is one of the few examples of how mouse models can be used to interrogate mechanisms of minimal residual disease in cancer therapy. As a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Gilbert was a Virginia and Daniel K. Ludwig Graduate Fellow, a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Postdoctoral Fellow, and a recipient of a Pathway to Independence Award from the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Gilbert’s laboratory is supported by the National Cancer Institute and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.