Sha Cao

Sha Cao is a Senior Professor at Oregon Health & Science University, specializing in cancer research, tumor biology, and bioinformatics. Her work integrates cell biology, immunology, and genetics to advance oncology and medicinal research. Recent breakthroughs include transcriptomics-based modeling of methionine metabolism to estimate DNA methylation activity and epigenetic aging, a hyper-relational knowledge base for grounded metabolic reasoning, and the depletion of fibrinogen to suppress pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma growth and metastasis. She has also pioneered segmentation-free methods for high-resolution spatial transcriptomics and single-cell metabolic flux analysis of tumor-infiltrating immune cells. Her research on Peroxiredoxin-1 absence coupled with Ref-1 redox inhibition in PDAC highlights novel therapeutic targets. Cao received a $946,000 award for computational modeling of cancer-specific metabolic variations to improve therapeutic target detection, underscoring her leadership in precision oncology.