A Five-Year Journey Turning Replication Stress into a Targetable Opportunity in Colorectal Cancer

We are proud to celebrate Dr. Kristi Buzo,who has successfully earned his PhD following a five-year journey defined by scientific rigor, perseverance, and intellectual growth.

Over the course of his doctoral research, Dr. Buzo addressed a central challenge in colorectal cancer (CRC): overcoming therapeutic resistance. His work focused on replication stress and the DNA Damage Response (DDR) as dynamic and exploitable vulnerabilities in resistant tumors.

By investigating key regulators of replication stress—most notably ATR and WEE1—his research demonstrated how pharmacological inhibition of these pathways can convert adaptive stress tolerance, commonly observed in therapy-resistant CRC, into a therapeutic liability. Disruption of replication stress control mechanisms led to excessive DNA damage and selective cell death in resistant cancer models.

Importantly, this work reframes therapeutic resistance not as a static barrier, but as a modifiable DDR state. In doing so, Dr. Buzo’s research expands the scope of DDR-targeted therapies beyond classical BRCA-like contexts, opening new translational opportunities for the treatment of colorectal cancer.

We congratulate Dr. Kristi Buzo on this outstanding milestone and look forward to seeing the continued impact of his work in translational cancer research.