By Darby Kendall
Many early career scientists innovating their fields arrive at the world of research thanks to the guiding hands of their mentors. Choosing a scientific specialty can be a formidable process, and having the support of a seasoned scientist can make all the difference, just as it did for Ph.D. candidate Kenneth Riley.
Riley, who was named Early Career Innovator at the 2025 OHSU Innovation Awards, went to the University of Minnesota Morris to play basketball as his focus. Wanting to meld his mother’s career as a nurse and his father’s as a carpenter, his academic advisors recommended Riley to major in physics. His love of science took off from there.
“My story is built by great mentors I’ve met who have fostered my path forward into research,” Riley reflected. “Senior year at university came, and I was hoping to be accepted into a Ph.D. graduate program. I got into a few, and it was very difficult to decide where to go. My mentor now, Dr. Thuy Ngo, wasn’t on my interview schedule, but she reached out to me personally because she saw promise in me after reading my resume, and we share a similar degree in physics. After meeting, it was clear to me Thuy was a great fit and that is why I ended up choosing OHSU.”
Under the guidance of Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research Center (CEDAR) member Thuy Ngo, Ph.D., Riley has developed a new diagnostic technology that could detect cancer by analyzing changes in DNA from a patient’s blood sample. The technology uses epigenetics, the study of DNA modifications and how they change the way DNA is organized three-dimensionally within a cell. This controls whether genes are turned on or off, and abnormal modifications can be used to detect disease in a minimally invasive way.
“An analogy I like to use is that if the human genome was a book, your genetic code, A, T, C and G, are the words in that book. Every cell uses the same book, but many cells act differently, like your liver cells compared to your brain cells. This is because they choose to utilize specific parts of the book and ignore others. Part of that decision is determined by these epigenetic modifications that end up on the DNA.
“One way to think about it is these modifications are like changing the font, italicizing, bolding or underlining. It doesn’t change the genetic code; it just changes how you interpret it,” Riley explained. “As you can imagine, cancer really causes havoc in these epigenetic modifications. It changes how those genes are interpreted and therefore used. This happens very early on in cancer, and typically it propagates across the entire genome, where mutations of the underlying genetic code happen at specific points. When you’re looking for this disease in the blood, detecting these epigenetic markers casts a wider net because they happen in more places.”
When DNA from cells enters the bloodstream, it is fragmented into small pieces, and the three-dimensional organization it once had is then lost. Other current procedures that analyze epigenetic changes in patients often rely on combining multiple laboratory methods and typically require invasive tissue biopsies to work with intact DNA. Riley’s new diagnostic technology rebuilds the epigenetic landscape from fragmented DNA in the blood and would allow clinicians and scientists to non-invasively detect epigenetic changes with a single test from a standard blood sample, lessening the physical burden on patients.
Riley credits OHSU’s collaborative nature with propelling him to develop such a tool. “It just goes to show how much OHSU and the Knight Cancer Institute have given us the platform to do projects like this,” Riley said. “The resources we have, the collaboration, the connection to clinicians, the patient samples, the generous people who have volunteered to give their blood, all these things need to come and work together for this to be able to happen. The entire platform has allowed students like me — who come in excited to learn— to have that great progress because of what we have set up here.”
A guiding hand
Ngo’s mentorship of Riley has also encouraged him to aim higher with his research. He appreciates that her aspirational nature makes him think in ways he never had prior, as both a mentee and a brainstorming partner.
“Thuy’s greatest strength as a mentor is her passion for what she does. It is very infectious, so you feel more passionate about what you’re doing,” Riley said. “I love the sessions going back and forth of what we could do next, or what our work could turn into. She’s very forward-thinking and very aspirational, and that feeds into my work as well. I feel like I’m turning into an independent scientific researcher under her mentorship. She really lets me figure things out on my own, but she’s also there to guide me when I need it.”
One of Riley’s motivators in his work, and a large reason why he joined Ngo’s lab within CEDAR, is seeing how much more there still is to learn about cancer. The disease is frequently adapting and changing, and with its study comes a continual need for the science to evolve as well. The challenge of constant growth, along with the fact that cancer has such a personal impact on so many lives, is what drives Riley in his research.
“I’m fascinated by how smart cancer is and how good it is at adapting to its own environment in new ways, ways that we still don’t know a lot about. What we do is try to figure out what signals it gives out during this process, so we can find the cancer early on,” Riley said. “Cancer is something that’s touched almost all of our lives in some way or another. I think it’s a field motivated on a personal level, made up of people that are out to discover more because we have family members that have been affected or overcome by the disease.”
Reflecting on the future of his sequencing technique, Riley is excited to see what other disease applications it can have beyond cancer. With Ngo’s guidance and the support of the Early Career Innovator Award, Riley is ready to help patients with his new platform.
“I really care about this project, and I do think it could help a lot of people,” Riley said. “We’re envisioning a future where we can remove serendipity from disease diagnosis because of the new information we can get directly from blood. We’re developing something special, something new and unique, so I’m excited to see where it will go.”
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CEDAR researcher: Thuy Ngo, Ph.D.
Ngo’s work involves analyzing blood samples for signs of early disease, aiming to detect signals from the body that mark transitions from healthy to cancerous states.
