Lu Han, Ph.D.

I am a postdoctoral fellow in Cancer Biology. I have a long-held research interest in tissue interactions and signaling networks during organogenesis and pathogenesis. In further pursuit of my interests in tissue interactions in disease, I then moved on to develop my expertise in cancer biology. Pancreatic cancer is one of most devastating malignancies and is characterized by an expansion of the stromal fibroblasts. Cancer associated fibroblasts (CAFs) play important and complex roles in modulating the tumor microenvironment. Leveraging my knowledge in foregut development, I performed lineage tracing studies in mouse and demonstrated that the splanchnic mesenchyme is the fetal origin of pancreatic CAFs (Han et al, Nat Commun, in press). I aim to further investigate the persistence of splanchnic gene signatures in pancreatic fibroblasts during tumorigenesis. My preliminary data suggests a dynamic expression of two splanchnic factors FOXF1 and GATA6 in fibroblasts with distinct spatial distributions in the tumor microenvironment. In this current proposal, I will rigorously test the hypothesis that splanchnic derived CAFs are patterned into FOXF1 or GATA6 positive CAFs by the Hedgehog pathway to restrain pancreatic cancer progression.