Research Interests
Dr. Enkemann is currently developing several lines of research related to cancer or early childhood growth. His primary interest is in personalized medicine as it relates to cancer treatment. He is working on several aspects of how drug metabolizing enzymes influence a patient’s response to treatment for cancer. This occurs at the level of how enzymes metabolize chemotherapeutic drugs in the liver and bloodstream (standard pharmacogenomics) as well as on the level of the tumor. He has evidence that individual tumors express some drug metabolizing enzymes, which adds an extra level of complexity to the choice of drug to use for any given tumor. He is currently working with students to define how different chemotherapeutic agents with similar mechanisms of action can be metabolized by different drug metabolizing enzymes. Based on the combination of variants in a patient’s genome, one drug might be more active than another. In addition to that, because of the gene expression of the tumor, some drugs might be completely ineffective. All of this contributes to a more comprehensive analysis of a tumor. An analysis that includes the patients genome, the tumor’s genome, and the tumors proteome. A second line of research involves the study of early infant growth for the purposes of developing a decision support tool for the detection of growth problems in young children. A more immediate project is the analysis of growth measurements in the clinical setting. Analysis of existing growth data suggests that infant growth measurements are not frequent enough and often erratic. The current project looks to develop a training module to improve the measurement of infants and investigate whether more frequent measures are feasible and helpful in plotting growth.
Dr. Enkemann is one of the world’s leading experts on the isolation and analysis of nucleic acids especially in situations where one might wish to study RNA, DNA, and proteins. The other technologies that he has experience with are too numerous to list here. Of unique use is his experience with next generation sequencing technologies, microarray technologies, and the bioinformatic resources necessary to support the analysis of these technologies. In addition, he has knowledge of many of the pharmacogenomic databases that serve as resources for how human variation influences medical decisions.