Marianne Bhatt

Marianne Bhatt has defined how cancer signaling pathway reactivation drives resistance to targeted therapies, demonstrating that inhibition of the MAPK or PI3K pathway triggers compensatory feedback loops and pathway crosstalk that restore proliferative signaling through alternative routes. Her research showed that RAF inhibition in BRAF-mutant melanoma paradoxically activates MAPK signaling through CRAF dimerization and RAS activation. She established that dual pathway inhibition targeting both MAPK and PI3K simultaneously delays but does not prevent resistance emergence. Her systems biology approach to mapping signaling network adaptations has informed rational multi-drug combination design for resistance prevention.