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The Eisinger Lab is part of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Muscle tissue can give rise to soft tissue sarcomas (STS) that are aggressive and metastatic. However, the underlying transformation events associated with these complex and heterogeneous tumors are unknown. Adult STS are not linked to driver mutations known to cause other cancers and their poor molecular characterization has hindered the development of effective therapies. As a result, STS treatment has not changed significantly in ~30 years. We approach this problem by focusing on the identification of critical signaling pathways and microenvironmental features that permit sarcoma cell survival, proliferation, and dissemination. Our work has established the impact of the Hippo signaling pathway on tumor cell and infiltrating T-cell function during primary sarcomagenesis.

The long-term goal of Eisinger lab is to understand the origins and critical drivers of soft tissue sarcomas; a devastating yet understudied family of mesenchymal malignancies. Using novel in vivo tools, human clinical samples, and biomaterials we are working to break the barriers to new therapies, which have plagued this field for decades. Current clinical trials based on our work will be supplemented with additional arms to best serve sarcoma patients as we continue to identify druggable targets and pathways and to identify patient cohorts that will derive the most benefit from these approaches.