Massachusetts General Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based research enterprise in the U.S., with nearly $1.3 billion in research operations in 2023. The Mass General Research Institute comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments.
But what do each of these groups do? Learn more about the individual labs and centers in our #ThroughTheMagnifyingGlass series, where we take a closer look at the teams that make up the Mass General Research Institute.
In this post, we are highlighting the Faden Lab run by Daniel Faden, MD, FACS!
Dr. Faden is a head and neck cancer surgeon-scientist at Mass Eye and Ear and Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a principal investigator at the Mike Toth Head and Neck Cancer Research Center, an associate scientist at the Broad Institute and an Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School.
Learn more about the lab below.
What research do you perform, and why is it unique?
The primary focus of our laboratory is developing and applying blood-based cancer diagnostics, or liquid biopsies. Our goal is to detect, diagnose, and monitor cancers more accurately than current approaches, and to do so in a non-invasive way.
Currently, we are mostly heavily focused on human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated cancers, in particular, HPV-associated head and neck cancers.
Our lab has a few unique aspects. One is that every scientific question we try and tackle is guided directly by clinical dilemmas encountered by our patients and clinicians like myself.
For example, we study how to better determine if a cancer is completely removed immediately after surgery, with high certainty, also known as minimal residual disease detection, using liquid biopsies developed in the lab.
My role as a cancer surgeon means the questions we ask, and how we answer them scientifically, are tightly interwoven with our patients both physically and philosophically.
Meet the Team
We are a very diverse lab of eight members. Our team hails from seven different countries, including the USA, Ukraine, Colombia, Puerto Rico, India, China, the UK and Japan. Everyone brings a unique and diverse perspective to the science and culture of the lab.
What publication is really important to your ongoing research?
Our lab has developed several liquid biopsies for HPV-associated cancer which we have shown outperform standard-of-care approaches in various clinical settings.
We describe one of our first assays in a manuscript titled “Cell-Free HPV DNA Provides an Accurate and Rapid Diagnosis of HPV-Associated Head and Neck Cancer.”
This work demonstrated that a liquid biopsy developed by our lab was more accurate, potentially faster and less expensive than traditional ways of diagnosing HPV-associated head and neck cancer.
While our newer liquid biopsies work much better than this original test, this manuscript set the stage for much of the work going on now, which has grown in complexity and sensitivity.
Recently, we also developed a new liquid biopsy called HPV-DeepSeek, which is over 25 times more sensitive than our original liquid biopsy.
HPV-DeepSeek can also look at many more cancer-related features, which are then analyzed using machine learning.
We have used this ultra-sensitive test to show that we can detect HPV-associated cancers in the blood up to 10 years before patients are diagnosed with the cancer.
This work is important because currently, there are no screening tests for five of the six HPV-associated cancers. You can read more about this work, which is ongoing, in a pre-print titled Blood-Based Screening for HPV-Associated Cancers.
How does your research apply to everyday people's lives?
Our research is directly tied to real clinical problems faced by patients. We aim to develop and validate accurate and non-invasive approaches that improve head and neck cancer screening, diagnosis and monitoring.
We are in the process of transitioning our HPV-DeepSeek assay from a research test to a clinical test run through the Department of Pathology, which we hope will be available for patient care at Massachusetts General Hospital and Mass Eye and Ear this year.
This clinical roll-out is a huge team effort in collaboration with the Center for Integrated Diagnostics at MGH.
It’s very exciting to see a test we developed actually move into clinical care and provide direct benefits to patients.
What is something you wish everyone knew about the research you perform?
One thing people are always surprised to hear is that HPV-associated throat cancers surpassed cervical cancer as the most common HPV-associated cancer in the US about 10 years ago.
HPV causes about five percent of all cancers globally, so the questions we are asking and trying to answer apply to a large number of patients–nearly one million worldwide.
To learn more about the Faden Lab, check out their website or follow them on X.
About the Mass General Research Institute
Massachusetts General Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based research program in the United States. Our researchers work side-by-side with physicians to develop innovative new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease.
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