Dr. Wilson’s career has focused on gene regulation in cancer. Recently, Dr. Wilson and colleagues have focused on chemotherapy resistance mechanisms, and how current targeted therapies might select for cancer stem cells, including melanoma stem cells (MSCs). MSCs are considered highly chemotherapy-resistant, as well as representing the most aggressive sub-population of cells in a tumor. Various work by numerous independent groups worldwide have demonstrated that MSCs are marked by expression of putative multiple proteins including ABCB5, CD271 (NGFR), RANK, and ALDH1. Dr. Wilson and colleagues, including his mentor Dr. Markus Frank (whose group originally reported MSCs in 2008), are investigating ways to characterize MSCs at the molecular level to reveal new pathways and targets for novel targeted therapies with the ultimate goal of destroying the MSCs alongside the rest of the tumor, using combined chemotherapeutic strategies.

For a current list of Dr. Wilson’s scientific publications please visit the following link:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/browse/collection/48737295/?sort=date&direction=ascending