Jonathan Kelber, PhD

Education

Ph.D., University of California San Diego
BS, Cal Poly Pomona

Courses Taught

Undergraduate Biology Courses

Graduate Catalog

• BIO 3342 Molecular Cell Biology
• BIO 4199 Scientific Communication 
• BIO 5300 Advanced Studies in Biology
• BIO 5307 Advanced Cell and Molecular Biology
• BIO 5409 Cancer Biology

Biography

Jonathan Kelber received his BS/MS in chemistry from Cal Poly Pomona, where he conducted research in biophysics under the mentoring of Dr. Patrick Mobley. He received a PhD in biochemistry from UCSD and studied TGFbeta signaling with Wylie Vale at the Salk Institute. He completed an NIH-IRACDA postdoctoral fellowship with Richard Klemke at UCSD and identified the PEAK1 pseudokinase as a driver of cancer progression. He is an associate professor of biology at Baylor University and directs the NIH-funded Developmental Oncogene Laboratory that aims to understand mechanisms controlling cell state plasticity and proliferation during cancer progression and tissue regeneration. He was a 2013 ASBMB grant writing scholar, a 2014 ASCB-MAC FRED program participant, a 2017 ASCB-MAC visiting professor with Joan Brugge's group at the Harvard Medical School Ludwig Center, the 2019/20 US-UK Fulbright-CRUK fellow with Martin Humphries' group at the University of Manchester and the 2021 CSUPERB Faculty Research Award recipient. He serves as a Member of the ASCB MAC and a member of the NIH Tumor Evolution Heterogeneity and Metastasis (TEHM) study section. He enjoys spending time with family/friends, playing music, serving his church community and playing sports.

Research Interests

There is a strong correlation between solid tumor progression and poor patient survival. Many signaling pathways and molecular/cellular mechanisms that control normal tissue homeostasis are dysregulated in cancer. Our group aims to identify and understand factors that regulate cancer metastasis, therapy resistance and tumor microenvironment diversity, and whether these factors may also control tissue repair.

Selected Publications

• Blockade of Cripto binding to cell surface GRP78 inhibits oncogenic Cripto signaling via MAPK/PI3K and Smad2/3 pathways  Kelber et al. Oncogene (2009)
• KRas induces a Src/PEAK1/ErbB2 kinase amplification loop that drives metastatic growth and therapy resistance in pancreatic cancer  Kelber et al. Cancer Research (2012)
• PEAK1 Acts as a Molecular Switch to Regulate Context-Dependent TGFβ Responses in Breast Cancer  Agajanian et al. PLoS ONE (2015)
• Tumor Microenvironment Heterogeneity: Challenges and Opportunities  Runa et al. Current Molecular Biology Reports (2017)
• ITGA1 is a pre-malignant biomarker that promotes therapy resistance and metastatic potential in pancreatic cancerGharibi et al. Scientific Reports (2017)
• Identification of myosin II as a cripto binding protein and regulator of cripto function in stem cells and tissue regeneration  Hoover et al. BBRC (2018)
• Secretomes from metastatic breast cancer cells, enriched for a prognostically unfavorable LCN2 axis, induce anti-inflammatory MSC actions and a tumor-supportive premetastatic lung  Meade et al. Oncotarget (2019)
• A SNAI2-PEAK1-INHBA stromal axis drives progression and lapatinib resistance in HER2-positive breast cancer by supporting subpopulations of tumor cells positive for …  Hamalian et al. Oncogene (2021)
• Patient‐Derived organoids as therapy screening platforms in cancer patients  Khorsandi et al. Advanced Healthcare Materials (2024)
• Heteromulticellular Stromal Cells in Scaffold-Free 3D Cultures of Epithelial Cancer Cells to Drive Invasion  Ortiz et al. Journal of Visualized Experiments (2025)