Talk Title: Charting Therapeutic Vulnerabilities in Rare Tumors with Patient-Derived Organoid Models

About the Speaker: Alice Soragni, PhD, is a translational cancer researcher with a multidisciplinary background in molecular biology, cell biology, physical chemistry, and structural biology.

She leads a lab in UCLA’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery focused on improving cancer outcomes through innovative modeling and therapeutic strategies. Her research investigates how protein aggregation drives cancer progression, with the goal of identifying new therapeutic targets and developing peptide-based anti-cancer agents.

Her team has developed high-throughput methods to grow and screen patient-derived tumor organoids, building a biobank of 800+ samples from 400+ patients across 80+ tumor types. These models preserve key tumor features and support studies of drug sensitivity, tumor heterogeneity, and predictive biomarkers. Recent work includes a sarcoma organoid platform covering 24 subtypes.