Lau’s research focuses on understanding brain and bone tumors, as well as researching and diagnosing different blood cancers in children. His team works to determine which cells the cancers originate from, the genetic aberrations driving the disease and the treatments that will give patients the best chance to not only survive, but to thrive. He believes there is a way to fight childhood cancer without taking away patients’ normal lives after they survive their cancer. Many treatments are effective in killing the cancerous cells, but also harm healthy cells too. This affects not only the children physically but also their families.
“You are dropping an atomic bomb on an anthill. You wipe out the anthill, but the price you pay is pretty steep,” says Lau. “You have a lot of collateral damage to the normal tissues in the body.”
Advancing pediatric cancer practices
Clinicians use such aggressive practices in treating cancer because they aren’t able to define normal and cancer cells more precisely. Lau and his team of researchers have been developing methods to find the fundamental differences between these cells.
But how can cancer treatments be improved? Lau and his team intend to use their findings that distinguish normal versus cancerous cells to inform the development of personalized medicine that can specifically target cancerous cells and limit irreversible side effects.
“We need to find the qualitative differences between normal and cancerous cells to contribute something to the improvement of the overall outcomes of children with cancer,” says Lau.
At JAX, Lau uses various types of patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models to study the exact cancer he observes in the patients he sees at Connecticut Children’s. PDX models are created by introducing the patient’s tumor cells into a mouse engineered to accept foreign cells and tissues and, sometimes, to have a human-like immune system. He also works with cancer cell models in vitro (in cell cultures outside of a body). Both types of models are essential. Mouse models provide biological context, while cellular models yield an inexhaustible supply to study over time.
