Luke Torre-Healy

Image: LukeLuke Torre-Healy

Education:

B.A. Vanderbilt University (2015)

PhD Stony Brook University (2023)

Current Position:

7th Year MSTP

3rd Year Medical Student

Advisor:

Richard Moffitt & Joel Saltz

Graduate Program:

Biomedical Informatics

Research Interest:

My broad research interest is leveraging state of the art computational technologies and approaches to develop pipelines that streamline our ability to quickly and robustly stratify cancer patients in order to improve both clinical decision making and the development of new therapies through targeted research. My work emphasizes rapid, flexible, pre-packaged tool generation to facilitate downstream implementation of analytical tools. During my PhD training at Stony Brook, I developed a point-and-click web tool for serial analysis of gene expression and survival analysis in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma as part of a project seeking to explain discrepancies in PDAC molecular subtyping approaches of the past decade. In PDAC, I then worked towards understanding the interplay of morphology and gene expression through the generation of a vision-transformer based deep learning tool for subtype prediction. My most recent project centered on standardizing our approach to investigation lymphocyte presence and distribution through integration of automated detection pipelines that is currently being used at a multi-center study, enabling massive scale collaboration between researchers in breast, lung, colorectal, and prostate cancer.

Publications:

 *Kawalerski R, *Torre-Healy L, Oh K, ... Moffitt RA, pdacR: Curation and analysis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma gene expression data supports a two-subtype model and enables community exploration. Submitted July 2021 - Nature Cancer

**Camolotto SA, Belova V, Torre-Healy L, Vahrenkamp J, Berrett K, Conway H, Stubben C, Moffitt R, Gertz J, Snyder E. Reciprocal regulation of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma growth and molecular subtype by HNF4α and SIX1/4. Gut. Accepted May 2020.

**Le H, Gupta R, Hou L, Abousamra S, Fassler D, Torre-Healy L, Moffitt RA, Kurc T, Samaras D, Batiste R, Zhao T. Utilizing Automated Breast Cancer Detection to Identify Spatial Distributions of Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes in Invasive Breast Cancer. The American Journal of Pathology. 2020 Apr 8.

Mulkearns-Hubert EE*, Torre-Healy LA*, Silver DJ, Eurich JT, Serbinowski E, Hitomi M, Zhou J, Przychozden B, Zhang R, Sprowls SA, Hale JS, Alban T, Berezovsky A, Bell BA, Lockman PR, Jha BK, Lathia JD Development of a Cx46 targeting strategy for cancer stem cells Published April 2019 – Cell Reports

Esakov E, Hale J, Richards E, Torre-Healy L, Gullapalli K, Trivedi D, Wessely O, Jensen J, Lathia JD, Reizes O. Therapeutic strategies to induce ERα in luminal breast cancer to enhance tamoxifen efficacy Published June 2019 – Endocrine Related Cancer

Thiagarajan PS, Sinyuk M, Turaga SM, Mulkearns-Hubert EE, Hale JS, Rao V, Demelash A, Saygin C, China A, Alban TJ, Hitomi M, Torre-Healy LA, Alvarado AG, Jarrar A, Wiechert A, Adorno-Cruz V, Fox PL, Calhoun BC, Guan JL, Liu H, Reizes O, Lathia JD. Cx26 drives self-renewal in triple-negative breast cancer via interaction with NANOG and focal adhesion kinase. Published Feb 2018 – Nature Communications

Cooper M, Torre-Healy LA, Alentado V, Benzel E, Mroz T. Heterogeneity of Reporting Outcomes in Spine Surgery Research. Published Jan 2018 – Journal of Clinical Spine Surgery

Dashzeveg NK, Taftaf R, Ramos EK, Torre-Healy L, Chumakova A, Silver DJ, Alban TJ, Sinyuk M, Thiagarajan PS, Jarrar AM, Turaga SM, Saygin C, Mulkearns-Hubert E, Hitomi M, Rich JN, Gerson SL, Lathia JD, Liu H.New advances and challenges of targeting cancer stem cells. Published Oct 2017 – Cancer Research

Torre-Healy LA, Chan CH. Just how critical is Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) to Metastatic Dissemination? Published Aug 2017 - J Pharm Sci Exp Pharmacol (Editorial)

Ma Y, Cheng Z, Liu J, Torre-Healy L, Lathia JD, Nakano I, Guo Y, Thompson RC, Freeman ML, Wang J. Inhibition of farnesyltransferase synergistically improves Notch-targeted therapy against glioblastoma stem cells Published Dec 2017 – Stem Cell Reports

Chernov M, Chen G, Torre-Healy LA, Friedman R, Roe AW. Microelectrode array stimulation combined with intrinsic optical imaging: A novel tool for functional brain mapping. Published Apr 2016 – Journal of Neuroscience Methods

Torre-Healy LA, Berezovsky A, Lathia JD. Isolation, Characterization, and Expansion of Cancer Stem Cells Published Jan 2016 – Methods of Molecular Biology: Book Chapter