Lab Projects
The Wu lab focuses on understanding how hepatobiliary lineage programs and developmental growth signals interact to promote tumorigenesis in hepatoblastoma in order to identify new treatment approaches for aggressive and chemo-refractory disease. Our current research comprises three main projects:
- The influence of developmental lineage programs on tumorigenesis in hepatoblastoma
- Growth signals that promote tumorigenesis in the developing liver
- Identifying new drug targets for aggressive pediatric liver cancers
Based on our prior work (Wu et al., Nature Communications 2024), we hypothesize that Wnt-mediated tumorigenesis in the developing liver occurs due to unique features of the hepatoblastic cell of origin and the local environment of the embryonic and early postnatal liver. We are testing this hypothesis by elucidating the lineage relationships between tumor cells in patient-derived hepatoblastoma models, identifying growth signals in the developing liver that promote tumor cell proliferation, and generating new mouse models to probe the clonal dynamics of Wnt-activated hepatoblasts and incipient hepatoblastoma formation during development.
