Humsa Venkatesh, Ph.D.

Research

The Venkatesh lab studies the reciprocal interactions between the nervous system and cancer. Our work emphasizes the electrical components of tumor pathophysiology and highlights the extent to which neural activity can control and facilitate disease progression both in and outside the brain. The understanding of these malignant mechanisms of co-opting neural plasticity has led to novel strategies to broadly treat cancers by disabling their ability to electrically integrate into neural circuitry. Our pioneering efforts in this emerging field of cancer neuroscience aim to harness the systems-level microenvironmental dependencies of tumor growth to develop innovative therapeutic treatments for various types of cancers. Our current work focuses on bidirectional neuron-cancer communication and network dynamics between the nervous system and cancers throughout tumor development. These studies will help to define a crucial new aspect of cancer pathophysiology and may identify new strategies for normalizing the tumor microenvironment.