Hays, Franklin A

Biography

Hays, Franklin A has completed his PhD from  Oregon State University in 2005

Research Interest

Current strategies for the treatment of cancer often involve some combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.  As a therapeutic class, anticancer drugs are in desperate need of more molecular understanding since they produce significant variability in efficacy and disposition across patient populations.  This reality is particularly disheartening since anticancer drugs are generally toxic, given in doses near those that produce toxicity, and have a narrow therapeutic window to affect positive outcomes. Thus, the overarching scientific objective within our laboratory is to pursue novel insights into the molecular basis of therapeutic efficacy in cancer treatment using a broad range of biophysical, biochemical, and cell biology techniques.  Often the initial focus of our efforts is on integral membrane proteins involved in drug transport or activity.   These proteins, though difficult to work with experimentally, are often involved directly in determining chemotherapeutic outcomes.  This work involves developing novel methods to express, purify, and - when pursuing structural biology - crystallize membrane proteins coupled with functional analysis.