Dr. Camargo’s lab has had a long-standing interest in deciphering the mechanisms that control mammalian tissue growth. Particularly, his lab has made seminal contributions to the discovery and understanding of the Hippo signaling pathway. Hippo is a biochemical cascade that controls the development of our organs, and his work has discovered important mechanisms by which tissues control the number of cells in them. Dr. Camargo’s work has been very influential to establish Hippo pathway components as novel therapeutic targets in a wide range of epithelial malignancies. Pharmacological agents that act on the Hippo pathway, some generated in his group, are at different stages of pre-clinical testing for cancer therapy. Thus, his work has been critical for the discovery of a new class of cancer drugs.

Dr. Camargo’s innovative and ground-breaking work has also extended to the field of stem cell biology. His group has developed technologies that allow for cellular barcoding, a technique that allows for genetic tagging and tracing of thousands of cells at a time, providing an unprecedented measure of cellular histories at single cell resolution. Using these tools, his lab has defined novel biological properties of blood-producing stem cells, basically re-writing the textbook knowledge about lineages and fates in the blood. This has included identifying novel cellular sources of platelet and lymphoid production within the bone marrow, identification of a number of key regulators of the hematopoietic stem cell state, and the identification of novel bone marrow micro-niches that control stem cell activity. These discoveries have important implications for treatments that would improve the safety and efficiency of bone marrow transplantations.