Taylor (Ruonan) Chen ’15 Authors Paper in “Nature”

While working in the S. Arthur Localio Laboratory, Department of Surgery, New York University School of Medicine, Taylor (Ruonan) Chen ’15 helped to author a research paper in Nature that was then highlighted in the New York Times. Taylor’s work has been studying the presence of specific fungi in the pancreas that may promote the growth of cancerous tumors.

 

The study “found that fungi can make their way deep into the pancreas, which sits behind your stomach and secretes digestive enzymes into your small intestine. In mice and human patients with pancreatic cancer, the fungi proliferate 3,000-fold compared to healthy tissue — and one fungus in particular may make pancreatic tumors grow bigger,” said the New York Times article.