Inventor Profiles

Research area Clinical research emphasizing the development of novel diagnostics and new therapies for genitourinary cancers. Basic science research examining genetic and epigenetic alterations in prostate cancer.

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What excites you about your work? 

“Our mission is to make discoveries that will improve the way we diagnose, prevent and treat prostate cancer. One aspect of our lab deals with coming up with better and earlier approaches to diagnosing prostate cancer non-invasively. We’ve discovered a series of changes to proteins that bind DNA that alter its function. The unique thing about what we’re interested in is that these so-called epigenetic changes occur in the normal appearing prostate tissue of men who have cancer elsewhere in the prostate. We don’t necessarily require a piece of a tumor to say you have cancer present. This approach should have an increased sensitivity for detecting when cancer is present.”

What do you hope to achieve? 

“We hope to come up with a liquid biopsy that will allow us to catch dangerous cancer before symptoms show up. Whether through urine or semen, this is a much better approach for detecting prostate cancer than blood, which dilutes these biomarkers. In the future, there might be information in this diagnostic process that would allow us to individualize a patient’s treatment, based on these findings. Another really interesting aspect is that these epigenetic changes are potentially reversible, so we might be able to use this information to prevent or reverse prostate cancer. That’s my ultimate goal. Every discovery has the potential to impact lives in Wisconsin and all over the world.”

David’s work has the potential to make prostate cancer screening, an area with conflicting recommendations and invasive tests, more accurate and accessible to men in their homes.

– Jennifer Gottwald, WARF, Director of Licensing