Through funding from the American Brain Tumor Association (Basic Research Fellowship), Art of the Brain, Cancer Center of Santa Barbara and NIH, Dr. Lai has established a translational brain cancer research laboratory that focuses on correlating molecular analysis of glioma patient tumor tissues with clinical phenotype. In particular, his laboratory has developed expertise with methylation profiling of patient tissues.
Complementing his laboratory research, Dr. Lai is an active clinician with a practice that focuses on primary brain tumors. As a clinician/scientist interested in improving treatment outcomes for patients with malignant gliomas, his approach to each patient is an opportunity to correlate clinical observations with molecular tumor characterization. Because of the molecular diversity and the wide variation of clinical response in malignant glioma patients, this approach has tremendous importance and immediacy in the development of biomarkers and personalized therapeutics.