Piyush Gupta

Piyush Gupta is a cancer biologist who performed a landmark chemical screen identifying salinomycin as a selective CSC-killing agent, demonstrating for the first time that small molecules can preferentially eliminate cancer stem cells over bulk tumor cells. This discovery opened a new avenue for CSC-targeted drug discovery. Gupta has made seminal contributions to understanding EMT plasticity in cancer, showing that non-stem cancer cells can stochastically convert to stem cell states, challenging strict hierarchical models. His recent work has identified ferroptosis vulnerability as a selective feature of mesenchymal/stem-like cancer cell states.