Circulating tumor cells drive metastasis and chemoresistance

In the Woodfield lab at Texas Children's Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine, we are dedicated to deciphering how tumor cells invade into blood vessels, survive in systemic circulation, extravasate at distant organ sites, seed new malignant growths, and resist standard therapies.

Metastasis is the leading cause of cancer-related death. Patients with metastatic disease have much worse outcomes compared to those with localized disease.

Many of the same pathways that drive metastasis also play important roles in chemoresistance. Thus, cells that resist standard chemotherapies are predisposed to be able to metastasize. Conversely, cancer cells that metastasize are more likely to be chemoresistant.

In the Woodfield lab, our goal is to understand how cancer cells metastasize so that we can design better therapeutic strategies that specifically target disseminated disease. All of our work focuses on pediatric liver cancer as a disease model for solid tumor metastasis.