Year 5
In the last year of funding we identified a novel mechanism that tightly controls airway stem cell proliferation for repair after injury. We found that perturbing this pathway results in precancerous lesions that can ultimately lead to lung cancer. Correcting the abnormalities in this pathway that are seen in smokers could allow the development of targeted chemoprevention strategies to prevent the development of precancerous lesions and therefore lung cancer in at risk populations. We also continued our work on trying to identify a cell of origin for squamous lung cancer and identifying the critical drive mutations that are required for squamous lung cancer to develop.