Our research

We developed a liquid biopsy test for circulating tumor cells for pediatric liver cancer that utilizes a panel of markers, including indocyanine green, Glypican-3, and DAPI. This work is now published in Hepatology Communications (Espinoza et al., 2024; PMID 38727682). We also collaborated on work to develop a test for circulating tumor DNA for pediatric liver cancer, which is now published in Cancers (Kahana-Edwin et al., 2023; PMID 38201440). Future work will focus on moving both of these tests into standard clinical practice.

We have performed single cell RNA sequencing of primary patient circulating tumor cells and built a rigorous pipeline for analysis of these data with the goal of elucidating gene expression changes that drive the unique behaviors of these invasive cells. We have also examined other datasets for candidate genes and proteins that are upregulated in tumor cells that represent vascular invasion and metastasis. Continued work will use our novel cell line and animal models to validate the role of these identified pathways in dissemination.

We have identified candidate novel small molecule inhibitors that target pathways involved in dissemination and are in the process of testing these agents for their effects on phenotypes related to dissemination including migration and invasion in vitro and incidence of metastasis in vivo.

We are in the process of optimizing how to best grow cell lines from patient-derived circulating tumor cells and from circulating tumor cells harvested from our novel patient-derived xenograft murine models. We are testing different medias and culture conditions to see how to best keep these unique cells alive and proliferative.

We developed a unique model of metastasis and recurrence with tail vein injection of the aggressive HepT1 cell line (Woodfield et al., 2022; PMID 35451474). We are pursuing similar studies with patient-derived cells and with cells manipulated with knock-out and overexpression of genes of interest to see specific effects on dissemination. We also generated chemoresistant murine models by iteratively treating chemosensitive models with standard chemotherapy regimens until they were resistant. Single cell RNA sequencing of these models revealed genes and pathways involved in chemoresistance for further studies.