Overview
Due to the relatively inferior long-term patient outcomes, we recognize the need for improving our understanding of pediatric sarcomas, specifically osteosarcoma, Ewing sarcoma and rhabdomyosarcoma. The laboratory has tremendous interest and experience in merging innovative murine models and patient-derived resources towards garnering molecular insights into sarcoma initiation, development, metastatic progression, and therapeutic resistance and translating these findings towards testing novel therapeutic interventions.
Research in our laboratory is focused on these areas:
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Utilizing tissue-specific genetic perturbation to form novel, applicable transgenic mouse models of metastatic osteosarcoma and rhabdomyosarcoma, both conditions that have particularly poor patient outcomes. Such models allow for further understanding of critical genetic and proteomic alterations involved in sarcoma development, progression and metastasis and can be utilized as preclinical models for therapeutic testing and efficacy.
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Use of innovative in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo models to investigate the roles of critical signal transduction mechanisms, such as the Wnt-signaling pathway, in the metastatic and therapeutic resistant conditions.
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Investigating the role and the therapeutic potential of the tumor microenvironment, focusing on non-tumor cell contributions and metabolic alterations, towards sarcoma initiation, development, and progression.
We have developed multiple local, national, and international academic collaborations to further enhance our studies from a basic science and translational/clinical approach. In addition, we have formed collaborations with multiple pharmaceutical companies to test the efficacy of novel therapeutic agents on pediatric sarcomas, which have led to the design and implementation of new clinical trials for pediatric sarcoma patients.
