Therapeutic Resistance in Cancer

Kris C. Wood, PhD
Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology

Precision Cancer Therapy

Our lab uses tools from cell biology, pharmacology, signaling, immunology, and genomics to define principles underlying the design of new, durable anticancer therapeutic strategies.

Under this broad heading, our work involves three key areas of emphasis. First, we use custom functional genomics approaches to define the landscape of signaling pathways capable of driving resistance to diverse therapeutic modalities. Second, we utilize knowledge of resistance landscapes to identify new therapeutic strategies that block or select against resistance evolution. Finally, we use unbiased approaches to define new, targetable vulnerabilities in human cancers, particularly those cancers driven by genomic alterations that are not amenable to conventional targeted or immunotherapeutic strategies.

Beyond purely translational applications, our studies should advance our basic understanding of the architectures of biological signaling networks, and the genomic tools we develop may be useful for systematically dissecting a wide range of additional biological processes.