Functional Genomics Landscape of Anaplastic Wilms Tumor

Background

This training project will focus on children with anaplastic Wilms tumor, a subset of Wilms tumor (WT) patients who face a particularly poor prognosis. While WT in general has a long term survival rate upwards of 90%, the children with anaplastic WT don’t respond as well to current treatment protocols.  We believe that a new type of treatment(s) geared towards anaplastic disease is warranted in the hopes of improving the current, often dismal survival rates for these patients.

Project Goal

To this end, we would like to collect, develop and validate several anaplastic WT primary tumor cell cultures and cell lines, then genetically sequence them looking for unique biomarkers and mutations.  In parallel, we would develop standard-risk WT cell cultures and cell lines.  These tumor cell cultures and cell lines would be tested on drug screens with 60 non-chemotherapy compounds known to act against specific proteins often found in cancer cells.  We hope that this method of discovering novel compounds might provide more-effective treatment options for children with anaplastic WT.