Dr. Sarah Woodfield Receives Faculty Research Award

Sarah Woodfield Ph.D., assistant professor of Surgery and member of the Pediatric Surgical Oncology Laboratory and the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center, has been awarded $25,000 in funding for her proposal, “Circulating tumor cell-derived models of liver cancer,” through the Faculty Research Award Program in the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine. The funding period for the award began July 1, 2019 and will end June 30, 2020. Dr. Woodfield’s project was chosen because it received an outstanding score from a review panel of expert investigators from outside of the Department.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are cancer cells that are shed from tumors into the bloodstream and can be collected non-invasively through a simple whole blood collection procedure. This project will involve isolation of CTCs from patients with liver cancer and from existing mouse models and growth of the CTCs in vitro and in vivo to generate new models of aggressive disease.

From 2012 to 2017, Dr. Woodfield focused her postdoctoral research on neuroblastoma and liver cancer at Texas Children's Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine. The main focus of her current work has been establishing and characterizing novel patient-derived cell lines (PDCLs) and patient-derived xenograft (PDX) mouse models of liver cancer.

Dr. Woodfield is a scientist specializing in the field of pediatric surgical oncology. She was trained in basic science, first completing her bachelor’s degree in biology with an emphasis on molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale University in 2007 and then her PhD in developmental biology at Baylor College of Medicine in 2012.