Hexin Chen,
Ph.D.
Associate
Professor of Biology
Co-Director,
Molecular, Cellular & Developmental
Biology Program
PSC621
803-777-2928
Research Areas:
Cell and Developmental Biology
Molecular Genetics and Development
Molecular Biology and Genetics
Despite aggressive clinical
treatments which include surgical resection, radiation, and chemotherapy, tumor
recurrence is essentially universal in cancer patients, which is due, at least
in part, to tumor cell heterogeneity. One of the currently prevailing models
explaining intratumoral heterogeneity is the Cancer
Stem Cell (CSC) hypothesis (Figure 1). According to this model, cancer stem
cells (CSCs) represent a subset of a heterogeneous cancer population that
possess characteristics associated with normal stem cells, specifically the
ability to give rise to all cancer cell types found in a particular cancer
sample. CSCs may generate tumors through the stem cell processes of self-renewal
and differentiation into multiple non-tumorigenic cell types. Convincing
evidence indicates that CSCs are inefficiently eliminated by current
therapeutic treatments and suggests that CSC persistence could be responsible
for disease maintenance and/or recurrence. Developing therapeutic interventions
that specifically target CSCs, an appealing strategy for improving cancer
treatment, requires an understanding of how CSCs escape normal regulatory
mechanisms and become malignant. Our laboratory is utilizing combined
molecular, biochemical, genomic and proteomic approaches to dissect signaling
pathways in breast cancer stem cells. Interdisciplinary collaborations are
established to leverage other expertise in nanotechnology and mathematical
modeling to assist understanding the behaviors of CSCs both in vitro and in
vivo and develop novel CSC-targeted therapies.
