David Quigley, PhD

Assistant Professor in Residence of Urology, Epidemiology & Biostatistics

My lab in UCSF's Department of Urology studies how targeted cancer therapy works and why it stops working. We particularly focus on understanding how prostate tumors develop resistance to androgen signaling inhibitors. To this end, we identify links between DNA structural variants, epigenetic changes, and patient outcomes by sequencing biopsy samples donated by cancer patients and employing integrative bioinformatics and machine learning methods. Recent epigenomic studies from my group and our collaborators have identified transcriptional drivers of treatment-resistant prostate cancer. We have also performed the first large studies of the chromatin conformation of metastatic prostate tumor using ATAC-seq and HiC. Our goal is to reconstruct how the tumor responds to therapy pressure by interrogating the tumor’s genome, epigenome, and transcriptome. With this information, we can understand the biology of lethal cancer, develop new biomarkers to select which patients will respond to therapy, and understand how therapy resistance develops.