Scholar Spotlight: Dr. Charles Gaber, data science & personalized prostate cancer treatments
Collaborative Endeavors Podcast: Season 4, Episode 2
Episode Summary Heading link
Dr. Charles Gaber is harnessing his expertise to address critical questions in cancer research.
As a faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago’s department of pharmacy systems, outcomes and policy and an affiliate of the CCTS Clinical and Translational Scholars (CATS) program, Gaber focuses on real-world drug safety and effectiveness. Driven by a passion for conducting observational studies, particularly in cancer outcomes research, his work aims to bridge gaps in population health by improving the design and analysis of studies where randomized trials are not feasible.
Gaber’s current research examines metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer. The project combines data from clinical trials with machine learning algorithms to create personalized treatment tools for clinicians. This tool, which integrates patient-specific data to refine treatment recommendations, seeks to address a key challenge in cancer care—how to translate broad trial results into tailored decisions for individual patients.
Gaber sees this tool as a step toward more personalized, data-driven treatment approaches with the potential to reshape clinical decision-making across many diseases.
“The idea comes from other disease sites and conditions that have used these methods,” said Gaber. “The tool itself will be specific to understanding the decision making of these androgen receptor pathway inhibitors, discovering or estimating- at a personal level- the expected benefit of these therapies, but these methods definitely generalize to clinical trials in any setting.”