Peter Houghton, Ph.D.

Developmental Therapeutics

Cancer Pharmacology/Drug development for pediatric solid tumors

The lab focuses on developing novel approaches to the treatment of childhood cancer, with funded projects on childhood sarcoma, low-grade glioma, and developing new in vivo models. Our research focuses on fundamental aspects of tumorigenesis, such as identifying proteins that interact with fusion oncogenes that are essential for tumor cell proliferation and survival, and on understanding proliferative signals that are required for proliferation and survival. For pediatric sarcoma, our focus is on growth factor signaling, and understanding the basis for intrinsic and acquired resistance to inhibitors of insulin-like growth factor signaling. Our studies of childhood glioma focus on tumors with mutated (activated) BRAF signaling and exploiting this defect to develop novel therapeutic approaches to prevent the development of drug resistance. A unifying theme running through all studies is the use of Patient-Derived Xenografts (PDX) where tumors from patients are engrafted into immune-incompetent mice. These models provide clinically relevant tissue to study biologic characteristics and to test new therapeutic approaches. The lab is a member of the Pediatric Preclinical Testing Consortium, supported by the NCI to evaluate novel therapeutics. The lab also has a major effort in developing and molecularly characterizing new PDX models of both leukemias and solid tumors from Hispanic patients in Texas.

Related diseases: Pediatric sarcomas (rhabdomyosarcoma, Ewing sarcoma), low-grade brain tumors (glioma), pediatric cancers of the kidney (atypical teratoid/rhabdoid), and nephroblastoma (Wilms tumor)

Techniques: Contemporary molecular biology techniques, patient-derived xenografts (PDX), single-cell sequencing, CyTOF, cell sorting, FACs, protein purification, mass spectrometry, cell culture.