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Spike Lab - New Pathways and Systems

Our work to date has focused principally on the mammary gland and breast cancer. However, the same approach is expected to be applicable to a wide variety of other tissues and tumor types.

We have a number of excellent candidate regulatory processes and pathways to test in these systems and in cancer models, and will be refining our candidates from specific cell types and critical settings. We are prioritizing candidate pathways for further study that have particular promise in therapy development. These include additional paracrine signaling pathways, immune modulators and surface molecule profiles. We are also interested in the metabolic and epigenetic regulators indicated by our work to date, and in transcription factor networks as it is generally poorly understood how these are integrated within the context of multicellular, stem cell and cancer systems.

If you have a cool idea related to this area or want to expand on a project we are already pursuing, we would love to hear from you. See the Join Our Lab page for more info.

Diagram of fetal mammary development
Fetal mammary development (top) shows a large increase in mammary stem cell capacity at later stages when the multicellular context around the epithelium is dramatically changing. Our profiling studies have implicated a number of players in this process ranging from transcription factors and metabolic regulators to extracellular matrix and paracrine factors. We suspect many of these factors also help fuel tumorigenesis and therefore represent molecular targets for therapy.