Meet the Investigator: Daniel Haber, MD, PhD

Daniel Haber is the director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and the Laurel Isselbacher/Schwartz Chair of Oncology at Harvard Medical School. He is also a PCF-funded investigator working in the area of progression biomarkers.

Renowned geneticist and oncologist, Dr. Daniel Haber is a new face to the field of prostate cancer research due greatly to the financial support given to the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF). This year Dr. Haber received a PCF Challenge Award to support the development of new, life-saving progression biomarkers for prostate cancer patients. The discovery of biomarkers that predict disease progression for prostate cancer has been a priority for the PCF.

Partnering with oncologists, biologists and engineers, Dr. Haber is refining an innovative system of microfluidic technology to count tumor cells circulating in a patient's bloodstream.

"The Prostate Cancer Foundation has made it possible for us to adopt the same technology [used in other cancers] for prostate cancer," said Dr. Haber. "We think it’s going to have a very big impact on patient treatment."

Dr. Haber's research on circulating tumor cells (CTCs) suggests CTC counts may predict survival and progression in patients with other solid tumors. With funding from the PCF, Dr. Haber is now focused on developing this technology as a tool to end death and suffering from prostate cancer.

In lay terms, microfluidics is a set of technologies that manages the movement of small amounts of fluid. Tumor cells circulating in blood are very rare, amounting to nearly one in a billion cells. The system allows blood samples to be processed in very small portions, making it possible to find rare cells. It is analogous to sorting a group of ten marbles at a time as opposed to a million – you are less likely to miss the one you're looking for if dealt with fewer at time.

Microfluidics has been in development for more than a decade, and scientists are now beginning to piece together clinically useful systems. According to Dr. Haber, use of his team's microfluidic CTC capture system could result in promising implications for early diagnosis of prostate cancer, and may also prove to measure prostate cancer patients' response to therapy.

"We know that these cells are there and that's how a cancer of the prostate spreads through the distant organs, the bone and elsewhere," said Dr. Haber.  "The question is if you can find them, what can you find out about them?  This is a very new technology and will be important for finding how prostate cancer spreads."

Energized by the potential microfluidics can bring to prostate cancer research, Dr. Haber is equally excited for the opportunity to team-up with other talented investigators. This joint effort between experts of different specialties allows Dr. Haber an increased accessibility to scientific findings. And according to Dr. Haber, this collaboration would not have been possible if not for PCF funding.

"It has enabled us to direct a very significant part of our lab in the direction to facilitate collaborations with clinicians who specialize in prostate cancer," commented Dr. Haber.  "It's exciting, and we're hoping the technology can wrap up quickly so we can have a rapid impact on patient's lives."

Read more about the device developed by Dr. Haber and Dr. Mehmet Toner

Meet the other prostate cancer investigators PCF has profiled.