New therapies are needed in Wilms Tumor

developing faithful models of wilms tumor

Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET) and other research efforts have identified key genetic alterations in Wilms Tumor, the most common kidney cancer in children. However, there is a paucity of patient-derived models of Wilms Tumor - over the years, the Drost group (organoids) and the Murphy group (PDXs) have begun to tackle this as has our lab (focus on cell lines).

Thanks to our prior collaborations with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Broad Institute along with our current collaborations at Emory University, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Rare Cancer Research Foundation, we are making progress in building faithful cancer cell lines that can be studied using high throughput methods.

New therapeutic strategies

We are using high throughput functional genomics to identify new therapeutic targets and in conjunction with next-generation patient derived models, we are validating and identifying mechanisms behind these targets in vitro and in vivo.

We will use mono- and multi-therapeutic strategies to help develop rational clinical trials locally with Katherine Sutton and Thomas Cash (Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta) or with our collaborators such as Michael Ortiz (Memorial Sloan Kettering) and Elizabeth Mullen (at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) or nationally with the Renal Tumors Committee at the Children’s Oncology Group.