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Dr. Sushovan Guha obtained his MD degree with distinction from University of Madras, India and subsequently graduated with MA/MPhil in Microbiology and Immunology from the Columbia University, New York. Next, he completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York. Dr. Guha then joined the prestigious Specialty Training and Advanced Research (STAR) Fellowship in Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles where he also received his PhD from the Molecular Biology Institute (MBI) under the astute tutelage of Professor Enrique Rozengurt. Dr. Guha is a board certified clinical gastroenterologist, internist, and a physician-scientist at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC). The research focus in Dr. Guha’s laboratory consists of unraveling signal transduction pathways in pancreatic cancer (PaCa), a devastating disease quite incalcitrant to conventional therapeutic regimens. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop novel therapeutic regimens, which will arise from better understanding of the genetic and epigenetic changes leading to mitogenic signal transduction pathways. Dr. Guha’s current focus is to dissect G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) mediated protein kinase D (PKD)-induced mitogenic and angiogenic signaling pathways in PaCa. His laboratory showed that PKC-PKD signaling pathways downstream of GPCRs contribute to both mitogenesis and angiogenesis in PaCa. Dr. Guha’s laboratory uses various molecular and cell biological techniques to unravel PKD-dependent critical signaling pathways both genetically (RNAi) and pharmacologically. Currently, his group has developed an orally available specific small-molecule inhibitor of PKD with strong therapeutic potency and is performing pre-clinical studies in multiple animal models of PaCa. His group is also developing genetically engineered models in mice to study the role of PKD in initiation and progression of PaCa. Finally, Dr. Guha is characterizing novel downstream targets (substrates) of PKD that modulate key cellular processes including oncogenic Ras-dependent mitogenesis, migration, drug-resistance, and epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in PaCa.