DF/HCC New Member

Please welcome Dr. Nehs who recently joined DF/HCC and is a member of the Head and Neck Cancer Working Group. 

Transcript:
My name is doctor Matthew Nehs, and I recently joined the Dana-Farber/ Harvard Cancer Center. And my lab studies anaplastic thyroid carcinoma. I am an endocrine surgeon and I operate on mostly diseases of the thyroid, parathyroid and adrenal glands.

I chose to study anaplastic thyroid cancer because it remains an unsolved clinical problem. Most of my patients do very well with papillary thyroid carcinoma and follicular thyroid carcinoma, and these are readily treated with standard modalities of just surgery and radioactive iodine. However, anaplastic thyroid cancer remains a significant problem that is unsolved clinically. And these patients have locally aggressive thyroid cancers that often can not be resected and unfortunately, these tumors do not respond well to targeted agents because of evolved tumor resistance.

My lab is investigating the role of metabolism on thyroid carcinoma. Most recently, we have looked at the ketogenic diet as an adjunct to treatment for anaplastic thyroid carcinoma. We’ve also been investigating the role of glycolysis inhibitors as well as lactate transporter inhibitors. And by combining these various metabolic pathways, we’ve been able to show that anaplastic thyroid carcinoma is sensitive to these manipulations, and we’ve also had good success both in vivo and in vitro. Our future directions are going to be looking at the role of diet and bariatric surgery on anaplastic thyroid carcinoma growth.