Developing and interrogating models of rare diseases  

The Hong Lab at Emory focuses on pediatric high risk solid tumors including kidney cancers such as renal medullary carcinomas (RMC) and Wilms tumors.  The objectives are to develop and genomically characterize rare cancer models and use these model systems to better understand each disease.  By sharing tissue from your surgery, you could help accelerate this research.

The Hong Lab is developing cell lines, organoids and xenografts which are used as model systems to study diseases.  This is particularly important for childhood kidney cancers, where scientists are limited in the ability to do research because there are not enough models of the different cancer types to understand each disease.  The ability to create faithful models of disease is critical to the ability to characterize mechanisms of these cancers and identify new therapeutic targets.