Dr. Taniguchi was a Rhodes Scholar who earned his MD PhD at Harvard Medical School with Lew Cantley, PhD, then completed a residency and research fellowship in Radiation Oncology at Stanford University under the mentorship of Amato Giaccia, PhD.

Dr. Taniguchi is now a physician-scientist at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, with a joint appointment in Radiation Oncology and Experimental Radiation Oncology. He is an active clinician specializing in treating gastrointestinal malignancies, with a clinical focus on unresectable pancreatic cancer, which accounts for over 45,000 patients each year.

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Dr. Taniguchi was a Rhodes Scholar who earned his MD PhD at Harvard Medical School with Lew Cantley, PhD, then completed a residency and research fellowship in Radiation Oncology at Stanford University under the mentorship of Amato Giaccia, PhD.

Dr. Taniguchi is now a physician-scientist at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, with a joint appointment in Radiation Oncology and Experimental Radiation Oncology. He is an active clinician specializing in treating gastrointestinal malignancies, with a clinical focus on unresectable pancreatic cancer, which accounts for over 45,000 patients each year.

His laboratory focuses on exploiting basic and translational aspects of hypoxia biology and metabolism for maximal therapeutic good in cancer and regenerative medicine. For instance, the Taniguchi laboratory has discovered that inhibition of the EGLN prolyl hydroxylases helps tissues to heal after radiation or chemotherapy injury. His lab has developed EGLN inhibitors like FG-4592 to protect normal tissues from radiation toxicity to enable ablative doses of cytotoxic treatments. He is the PI on an investigator-initiated Phase I/II trial that explores this concept.

We have developed a tractable mouse model of locally advanced pancreatic cancer that responds to stereotactic ablative radiation, and use this as a platform to test new drugs and study mechanisms of immune response and the tumor microenvironment using techniques such as single cell transcriptomics and whole exome sequencing to complement fundamental biochemistry assays.

As an outshoot of their initial studies in hypoxia, the Taniguchi lab also studies the role of mitochondrial dynamics in regulating pancreatic cancer metabolism, development, and progression and has also developed pharmacologic interventions in this pathway using genetically engineered mouse models, confocal microscopy and advanced sequencing techniques. The lab also has funded research on the intersection between hypoxia, the microbiome and cancers of the GI tract using 16S shotgun sequencing approaches.

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