Dr. Joe Gray, Ph.D., is now Professor Emeritus at OHSU. This is his former lab page.

The overarching goal in the Gray Laboratory is to develop more durable and tolerable control of advanced breast and pancreatic cancers. Current studies are carried out as part of collaborative team oriented projects led or co-led by Dr. Gray. These include:

Active projects:

• An NCI Cancer Systems Biology Consortium Center that aims to develop a systems-level understanding of how tumor intrinsic and extrinsic factors work together to enable triple-negative breast cancer to escape therapeutic control and devise robust control strategies.
• An NCI Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN) Research Center that performs comparative omic and multiscale image analyses of responsive and resistant lesions within individual metastatic breast cancer patients to discover mechanisms of resistance so they can be attacked therapeutically. 
• The Serial Measurement of Molecular and Architectural Responses to Therapy (SMMART) Program that focuses on identification of therapeutic vulnerabilities in advanced individual cancers of the breast, prostate, pancreas and AML become resistant to treatment in order to guide development of more durable and tolerable treatments.

Completed projects:

• An NIH Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) Center that aimed to develop datasets and computational strategies to elucidate how microenvironmental signals affect cell intrinsic intracellular transcriptional and protein defined molecular networks to generate experimentally observable phenotypes.

Omic and Multidimensional Spatial (OMS) Human Tumor Atlas

The Omic and Multidimensional Spatial (OMS) Atlas is one of several "U2C" Human Tumor Atlases (HTA) Research Centers of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Human Tumor Atlas Network, which emerged out of the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot Initiative. The purpose of the construction of these "atlases" is to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the "ecosystems of tumors at the macro- and micro-level" by describing changes in cellular, structural, and molecular characteristics of human cancers as they progress over time.

The OMS Atlas lead investigators are: Joe Gray, Ph.D. (Professor Emeritus at OHSU), Emek Demir, Ph.D., Gordon Mills, M.D. Ph.D., George Thomas, M.D., and Andrew Adey, Ph.D., and our team includes collaborators from Harvard Medical School and the MD Anderson Cancer Center, who will work together to develop "maps" of human metastatic breast cancers.

Read more

• Generation of the Human Tumor Atlases, National Cancer Institute
• Cancer and the Human Tumor Atlas Network (infographic), National Cancer Institute

Please direct any inquiries regarding the Omic and Multidimensional Spatial (OMS) Human Tumor Atlas to Heidi Feiler, Scientific Program Manager, feiler@ohsu.edu.