Estefania Labanca
Instructor
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center at Houston
Department of Genitourinary Medical Group
In spite of the major advances achieved in the field, prostate cancer bone metastasis remains a significant source of patient lethality and a major therapeutic challenge. My goals are to study the mechanisms underlying prostate cancer bone metastatic progression and ultimately develop innovative treatment strategies to halt tumor malignancy and improve disease outcomes.
We apply a biology-informed driven approach using clinically relevant patient-derived xenografts, organoids and their integrative molecular characterization in the context of the bone compartment to understand host stroma-tumor adaptations that enable growth and identify determinants of relapse and disease vulnerabilities.
Some of our current efforts focus on:
- studying upstream and downstream fibroblast growth factor (FGF) aberrant signaling activation mediating prostate cancer bone colonization to define the patient subset that may benefit from FGFR blockade, and rationally discover actionable targets for combination therapies to curb advanced prostate cancer;
- furthering the implications of the metabolic shift fueling castration resistant prostate cancer progression by using preclinical in vivo models, confirming findings in silico in human prostate cancer datasets and in human samples, to designate putative biomarkers to be harnessed for clinical purposes.
Education & Training
PhD - UT MD Anderson Cancer Center-Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences - 2019