Sofia Honorio, Ph.D.

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Sofia Honorio obtained her Bachelor degree in Microbiology and Genetics from the University of Lisbon, Portugal, in 1998. She was then awarded a European Union-funded PhD fellowship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, which enabled her to pursue her lifelong interest in cancer biology by joining Dr. Farida Latif’s lab at the University of Birmingham, UK. As a member of The International Lung Cancer Chromosome 3p21.3 Tumor Suppressor Gene (TSG) Consortium, formed by Dr Latif’s lab in the UK and 2 US labs (Michael Lerman’s lab at NCI, Bethesda, and John Minna’s lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas), she contributed to the joint efforts for the evaluation of the tumor suppressor candidacy of 8 resident 3p21.3 genes by performing mutational and expression studies in breast and other tumors associated with 3p allele loss. When there was evidence that the 3p21.3 gene RASSF1A was a TSG epigenetically inactivated in several solid tumors including lung and breast, Sofia conducted a study to assess whether promoter region hypermethylation of this gene could be detected in sputum samples and early breast tumor lesions and thus be used as marker for these two cancer types. The results of her PhD studies were summarized in 9 publications, 4 of which she was first author. In November 2004, she received her Ph.D. degree in Clinical Genetics by the University of Birmingham, UK. In March 2005, Dr. Honorio joined Prof. Minna’s lab and initiated the study of lung cancer stem cells (CSCs) with the support from The University of Texas SPORE in Lung Cancer Career Development grant. As part of this study, she used the flow cytometry-based Side Population (SP) technique and in vitro and in vivo assays in an attempt to identify more tumorigenic subsets in lung cancer. She found that human lung cancer SP cells are more clonogenic, tumorigenic, metastatic and with higher intrinsic drug resistance than the non-SP cells, suggesting that the SP phenotype may help identify a more malignant sub-population within lung cancer cells with stem-like properties. Most of this work was conducted with long-term cultured cancer cell lines, which are considered not to be a good model for the study of CSCs as they fail to recapitulate all aspects of primary tumors. By joining Dr. Dean Tang’s lab in April 2007, Dr. Honorio has since been given the opportunity to study CSCs and their involvement in tumor formation, maintenance and metastasis in human primary prostate tumors. With a recently awarded DOD fellowship, Sofia is thrilled to help elucidate the involvement of stem/progenitor-like cells in prostate cancer.

Sofia is currently supported by a