In February 2010, Dr. Kittler started to establish a fully independent laboratory utilizing genomic approaches to understand the molecular drivers of cancer development, progression, and therapeutic resistance at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW). In this vein, the main goals of the research of the lab over the first 11 years have been to understand the role of aberrant transcriptional regulation in cancer and to devise novel therapeutic approaches that target transcription factors for cancer treatment. Importantly, our group recently developed a lentiviral mutagenesis approach that enables rapid in vitro screening for gain-of-function mutations in genes, and over the last three years we have redirected the research efforts of our group to utilize this methodology to identify mechanisms of resistance against cancer therapy and engineer of synthetic cell line models of drug resistance for developing second-generation therapeutic agents that overcome resistance. For this effort, we collaborate with the groups of Drs. Westover and Minna at UT Southwestern as well as with the Heymach lab at MD Anderson Cancer Center
Also, Dr. Kittler serves as the Director of the McDermott Next Generation Sequencing Core and as the Associate Director of Shared Resources of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and participates in the training of graduate students in the Cancer Biology program of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at UTSW.