Benjamin Drapkin Lab

I am a translational lung cancer researcher and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW). My laboratory, located in the Hamon Center for Therapeutic Oncology, focuses on small cell lung cancer (SCLC), an aggressive and common malignancy with a dismal prognosis of less than one year that has not improved significantly in the past 40 years. We leverage a large collection of patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models that closely recapitulate the clinical features of their corresponding patients to discover new molecular targets to treat this deadly disease. Our current areas of focus are (1) to develop strategies to overcome or circumvent chemotherapy cross-resistance, which renders relapsed SCLC refractory to further care, (2) to discover the drivers of metastatic dissemination, especially to the brain, and (3) to elucidate the mechanisms that allow lineage transformation from lung adenocarcinoma into SCLC, which confers resistance to many oncogene-targeted therapies.