A few years ago, Michael Oliphant was a doctoral student working in the pharmacology lab of University of Colorado Cancer Center leader Heide Ford, PhD, to understand breast cancer metastasis, the spread of cancer cells to other organs. Now, Oliphant is back at CU as an assistant professor of pharmacology, establishing his own lab, and he’s the latest holder of a CU Cancer Center Rising Star Endowed Chair.
Oliphant’s lab will use patient-derived organoid models – cell cultures grown in vitro to mimic the structure and function of human organs – to study what he calls “the opposite ends of the breast cancer spectrum” – how breast cancer starts and how to overcome treatment resistance by late-stage tumors.
“I’m excited to be here. This university is on the forefront of a lot of things,” Oliphant says. “The facilities, resources, and people here are top notch.”
“Mike was a terrific graduate student here, and we were all thus very excited when, after completing a competitive postdoc at Harvard Medical School, he applied to return as faculty,” says Ford, the CU Cancer Center’s associate director for basic research and chair of the CU Department of Pharmacology. “We are thrilled to have recruited him back to Colorado, and look forward to his contributions to our department, both at the level of training the next generation of scientists, and also at the level of building a top-tier research program in cancer, with significant translational potential."
Michael Oliphant, PhD, with fellow CU Department of Pharmacy faculty members Alessandra Brambati, PhD, and M. Cecilia Caino, PhD at this year's Pharmacology Retreat. Photos courtesy of Michael Oliphant.
Oliphant now holds the second of what is anticipated to be four Rising Star Chair positions within the CU Cancer Center, each representing one of its four research programs. The first Rising Star Chair holder, representing the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program, is Channing Tate, PhD, MPH, who was appointed in 2022.
“This is a very prestigious chair for them to hold, and it supports their salary and their research programs. By doing this, we can recruit top scientists and clinicians from around the country who might not otherwise come to the CU Cancer Center,” says Richard Schulick, MD, MBA, director of the CU Cancer Center.
The chair Oliphant holds is endowed as part of a $10 million pledge to the CU Cancer Center, announced in January 2024, by its longtime benefactors, the Dudley Family. Over the course of three decades, the family has funded three other endowed chairs and also has supported a host of research programs.
Oliphant was born in Chicago to clinician parents, both recently retired. His father was a trauma surgeon, and his mother – an immigrant from the Philippines – was an emergency and psychiatric nurse. He grew up about three hours south of Chicago in Champaign, home of the flagship campus of the University of Illinois, where he studied molecular and cellular biology as an undergrad.
“I thought for a long time that was my track, to practice medicine like my parents,” he says. “But as an undergrad, I had some summer research opportunities, and I started to get very interested in basic research.”
Oliphant stayed at U of I to earn his master’s degree in integrative biology, studying limb regeneration by tree frogs.
“Early in development, if a frog loses a limb, they can fully grow it back, but as they age, the process becomes less successful,” he says. “And so I tracked markers of regeneration to see how they changed with age. The translational goal of the project was to see if there were things we could learn about tree frogs that could be useful for humans with amputated limbs.” Human limb regeneration isn’t possible today, but various research initiatives are underway worldwide in hopes that one day, fingers or limbs can be regrown.
Left: Michael Oliphant, PhD, in the lab. Right: Oliphant with his family. Photos courtesy of Michael Oliphant.
That work spurred Oliphant’s interest in translational research that could find clinical applications for basic science discoveries. After earning his MS in 2010, he spent time working in a clinical lab in Illinois.
Then Oliphant and his friends set out on a long cross-country road trip. “One of the stops was Colorado,” he says. “We spent a couple weeks camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. And I thought, ‘This is it.’ I decided I would definitely figure out a way to live here.”
In 2011, Oliphant moved to Denver to work for a couple of years as a lab technician at National Jewish Health. “It had a basic research element to it where I could develop assays,” he says. And in 2013 he started his PhD work the program of reproductive sciences (which later became integrated physiology) at CU.
“During a rotation in Heide Ford’s lab, I worked on breast cancer, particularly on metastasis, and I thought the work was awesome,” he says. “I love the way she approached science and the way she thought about it.”
One of Oliphant’s publications while in Ford’s lab identified how SIX2, a developmental protein, serves as a critical regulator of breast cancer stem cells, leading to late-stage metastasis, a major cause of breast cancer related deaths. His work on SIX2 led to an invitation to deliver a talk at the 2018 national meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Through his research at CU, Oliphant landed a Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow Transition (F99/K00) Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), “which allowed me to finish up my pre-doctoral work and paid for the majority of my post-doc.”
Then it was off to Harvard Medical School for Oliphant’s postdoctoral fellowship, where he was mentored by cancer biologists Joan Brugge, PhD, and Senthil Muthuswamy, PhD (now with the NCI).
At Harvard, Oliphant began his investigation of both ends of the breast cancer spectrum. He explored pre-cancerous evolution to find the early precursors of breast cancer, and also examined how metabolic reprogramming fuels drug resistance in estrogen receptor positive (ER-positive) breast cancer.
“In that experience, I learned a lot about 3D organoid cultures and did a lot of single-cell sequencing analyses, which help in the projects I’ll be working on now,” he says.
Left: Michael Oliphant, PhD, with Heide Ford, PhD, upon receiving his PhD in Integrated Physiology at CU Anschutz in 2019. Right: Oliphant with lab manager Dipikaa Akshintala and cancer biologist Senthil Muthuswamy, PhD, in whose lab Oliphant worked during his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. Photos courtesy of Michael Oliphant.
Choosing his next professional destination was “a really tough decision, to be candid,” Oliphant says. One option was going back to Illinois, close to his family. But he chose CU because of his pre-doctoral experience here.
“I looked back fondly on that experience,” he says. “I was very familiar with the culture of the pharmacology department. I knew I’d feel that support, that camaraderie, and that community that I felt before. And the fact that Dr. Ford was the chair put CU over the top.”
Also, Oliphant had met his wife in Colorado and they had the first of their two children here. They had made friends here who had kids of their own. “So it felt like fate to be coming back.”
Oliphant met with Schulick to discuss the Rising Star Chair program. “To me it was super compelling,” he says. “He laid it out as a way the CU Cancer Center could support faculty. He wants to create an environment where faculty feel valued.”
Oliphant says the chair gives him access to discretionary research funds. “If I want to take risks, I have the freedom to do so. I felt like they were going over the top to make sure that I had everything I needed.”
At his new CU lab, Oliphant will use organoid models as he continues his twin research directions of cancer evolution and drug resistance.
“For one thing, we want to know what the functional consequences of ostensibly normal breast epithelial cells harboring copy number alterations” – variations in the number of copies of specific DNA segments within a genome. “Are they allowing cells to progress to cancer? Do they cooperate with other mutations in genes that have already been shown to be associated with cancer?”
Meanwhile, Oliphant will also be seeking ways to accelerate the timeline for translating insights into drug resistance gleaned through molecular studies into clinical benefits for patients, particularly in the context of metabolic reprogramming.
He, along with colleagues at the University of Rochester and Harvard Medical School, have continued to develop and expand a library of more than 300 small molecule inhibitor drugs, some of which are already FDA-approved or are currently being tested in clinical trials. These drugs target various metabolic pathways and processes of cancer cells, an area that he considers to be “underappreciated and underexplored” in the context of drug resistance. The goal is to quickly test these drugs on the organoids to see which ones work best against a patient’s specific cancer.
Left: Michael Oliphant, PhD, presenting at the Mammary Gland Biology Gordon Research Conference in Lucca, Italy, in July 2024. Right: Oliphant with his postdoc mentor Joan Brugge, PhD (left), director of the Harvard Ludwig Cancer Center, and correspondent Dina Demetrius (center) in June 2025 during production of an episode of "Matter of Fact With Soledad O’Brien" on impacts of funding cuts on women's health research. Photos courtesy of Michael Oliphant.
In addition to his research, Oliphant is equally passionate about mentoring. He was a leader in the Harvard Medical School Black Postdoctoral Association. And when he was a PhD student, he volunteered as a career coach in the Denver Public Schools.
“That’s the reason I’m here today,” he says. “My parents were in medicine, and we had a lot of advantages that others didn’t. But also, I was able to take advantage of opportunities along the way. Mentors invested a lot of time in me and saw potential in me, even when I didn't necessarily see it. I am always trying to repay that and pay that forward.”
Now, Oliphant looks forward to spreading the word among his peers about CU Anschutz Medical Campus and the CU Cancer Center.
“When people hear about it, they say, ‘You guys are doing amazing stuff.’ We’re not exactly flying under the radar, but the more exposure we get, the more people see how great a place this is. I’m excited to be a part of helping the university do that.”