Faculty Sponsor: Wayne Bowen

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most frequent type of malignant human liver cancer, the fifth most prevalent cancer globally, and the third most fatal cancer in the world. As there is no current effective treatment, there is an urgent need to discover and evaluate new cellular targets for therapy. Kenneth will work as part of a team attempting to characterize the effects of sigma-2 receptor agonists, which have previously been shown to kill cancer cells in other tumor types and show the viability of sigma-2 agonists as an effective chemotherapeutic agent in HCC treatment.