Tikvah (Tiki) Hayes, Ph.D.
- Assistant Professor, Molecular and Medical Pharmacology
Research Areas
Tiki Hayes, Ph.D., studies how signal transduction proteins regulate cellular functions by transmitting signals through molecular pathways. She investigates how these pathways contribute to cancer initiation, progression and treatment resistance, aiming to develop new and more effective therapies.
Hayes focuses on the basic and preclinical mechanisms of oncogene dependency and signal transduction, as well as the development of novel therapeutic approaches based on these insights. She develops innovative cell lines and organoid models to explore the role of signal transduction proteins in cancer. Her long-term research goal is to provide insights into MAPK signal transduction, revealing how normal cell signaling converts to aberrant states and how these disruptions are maintained in cancer.
Her work addresses two major cancer care challenges: characterizing variants of unknown significance, or VUS, and unraveling mechanisms of resistance to targeted therapies. She develops systematic methods to proactively assess the functionality of unknown variants in cancer. She investigates the mechanisms underlying both on- and off-target sensitivity and resistance to targeted therapies using high-throughput genetic screening, as well as molecular biology and pharmacology approaches.
Understanding VUS is essential, as they hold the potential to explain a range of genetic disorders, uncover new disease mechanisms and identify novel therapeutic targets for cancer treatment.
“I’ve always been interested in understanding how proteins talk to each other and how dysregulation can result in disease etiologies. Cancer is essentially a set of diseases driven by abnormal protein communication.”
- Assistant Professor, Molecular and Medical Pharmacology
Research Projects
- Identifying how protein kinases — enzymes that regulate cell functions by adding phosphate groups to other proteins — become resistant to treatments
- Developing new model systems to investigate understudied protein kinases
- Conducting systematic functional annotation of protein kinase amino acid residues
- Uncovering mechanisms driving cell state regulation
-
Fellowship
- Cancer Biology and Genomics, Harvard Medical School, 2021
Degree
- Ph.D., Genetics and Molecular Biology, University of North Carolina, 2016
-