Gallini lab – Empowerment of healthy cells to prevent skin cancer

Our lab explores how the skin epithelium transitions towards, or even away from, cancer by defining cellular and molecular mechanisms orchestrating the competition dynamics between healthy and oncogenic cells in vivo.
To address these questions, we use the skin epithelium as a model system that is uniquely accessible by direct and non-invasive microscopic observation. We combine our state-of-the-art in vivo two-photon imaging of living mice with high throughput single cell transcriptomic and proteomic analyses to 1) track and manipulate the same cells over time and 2) identify therapeutic targets to suppress and treat cancer.