Goulan Lu, PhD

Overview

Aim: Treatment and Therapy

Pancreatic cancer remains one of the most difficult cancers to treat owing, in part, to the dense tissue layer, called stroma, that surrounds and protects pancreatic tumors. This stroma is made up of specialized cells called cancer associated fibroblasts or CAFs, that are actively reprogrammed by tumor cells to aid in the growth, spread, and protection of the tumor microenvironment. One potential reason promising new therapies that succeed in the lab and preclinical models ultimately fail in patients is because of the inability of the treatment to cross the stroma to reach the cancer cells. The lack of tools to measure drug delivery and target engagement directly in stroma rich tumors creates a gap between target discovery and ultimate success in the clinic.

Hirshberg Foundation Seed Grant recipient Goulan Lu, PhD, Assistant Professor of Urology at Stanford University, seeks to understand how and why drugs fail to reach pancreatic cancer cells and to identify ways that specific barriers can be overcome. Using patient samples from clinical trials to evaluate drug delivery and engagement in the tumor microenvironment, Dr. Lu’s project, Spatial Multi-Omics Mapping of Therapeutic Targets in Metastatic Pancreatic Cancers, will combine advanced tissue-mapping techniques with artificial intelligence to generate “virtual tumor” maps to predict which features of the tumor stroma should be targeted to improve drug delivery. The most promising targets will be evaluated in patient-derived models that preserve key features of the tumor-stroma interaction. This goal is that this platform will guide future drug-development studies while identifying better targets, ultimately improving the ability to treat metastatic pancreatic cancer.

The Hirshberg Foundation is proud to support Dr. Lu’s research with a 2026 Hirshberg Foundation Seed Grant Award and her efforts to improve treatments for metastatic pancreatic cancer through more complete understanding of drug delivery to stromal-rich tumors such as pancreatic cancer. In response to the news of her grant, Dr. Lu replied, “I am deeply honored and grateful to the Hirshberg Foundation for selecting our proposal for funding. This award will provide critical support for our efforts to identify therapeutic vulnerabilities in metastatic pancreatic cancer using spatial multi-omics.”