Dr. Philippe Lefrançois

My lab’s main goal is to improve pathogenetic, diagnostic and therapeutic knowledge of skin cancers, especially Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC), the most common of all human cancers, so patients can benefit from new targeted therapies and management options. In particular, we aim to define the cellular and molecular phenotypes of BCC that underlie aggressive tumor behavior. We are using computational biology, genomics, and molecular biology approaches on several types of samples. These include data from large cancer consortia, patient-derived tumors, publicly-available sequencing data from other patient cohorts, and primary cancer cell lines. With emphasis on clinically-important features, we are also interested in finding novel signaling pathways and actionable targets for BCC, and in characterizing the BCC tumor microenvironment.