Tyler Beyett, PhD

Lung cancer affects thousands of people in the United States each year and is the leading cause of death from cancer. We focus on the type of lung cancer most commonly found in young adults and those who do not smoke. Unfortunately, current medicines to treat these lung cancers do not work for all people or they stop working after a while. The goal of our research is to find new and safer ways to treat difficult lung cancers. Most current medicines work by turning off the molecule in a person’s body that causes the cancer. The new kind of medicine we are studying destroys the cancer-causing molecule instead of just turning it off. Removing the molecule means the cancer cannot survive and could cure patients. We want to learn if using two medicines at the same time will be better at destroying the cancer-causing molecule. We will do this by searching for new drugs and testing them in combinations to see if they stop cancer from growing better than the medicines patients currently take. The new drugs we hope to make will lead to new treatments that work better and are safer for patients. This means thousands of more people will survive each year and taking the medicine will not make patients as sick. The drugs we hope to make will work differently than current drugs and can be used to treat patients that can’t be treated with the medicines we have right now.