Manish Kohli, Director and Physician Scientist Training Program University of Utah Health, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“After a long wait through much of 2025, and despite achieving a 1st percentile ranking we are deeply grateful today as we receive funding from NIH for a UH2–UH3 grant that is focused on assay development in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC).
Incredibly grateful to my colleague-Dr Liang Wang for continuing on our efforts with patience, persistence and scientific rigor and conviction. This work will be carried out in close collaboration between Moffitt Cancer Institute (led by Dr. Liang Wang) and at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah by my lab.
Our goal is to develop a targeted, multimodal liquid biopsy assay that quantifies androgen receptor (AR) somatic alterations in mCRPC.
Specifically, our precision medicine focus will be on analytical performance of a multimodal cell-free nucleic acid (cfNA) assay that simultaneously detects AR amplifications, somatic mutations, and AR-V7 splice variants in a single blood sample and then on the clinical utility of this multimodal dPCR-based assay in real-world mCRPC cohorts.
In contrast to large, broad-panel liquid-biopsy approaches, this assay is intentionally focused on the most biologically relevant and prevalent alterations in mCRPC – i.e. AR alterations.
This strategy aims to deliver more cost-effective and precise tumor-biology solutions with rapid turnaround times (TAT), enabling precise and clinically actionable decision-making for mCRPC patients in future.”
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