Biology Department Seminar

Current research efforts and therapies for breast cancer focus on targeting the mechanisms governing primary cancer cell proliferation. Although these approaches effect cures in some cases and substantially extend remission times for others, untreatable metastases remain an all-too-frequent outcome and the leading cause of death in breast cancer patients. Hence, there is a pressing need to find new approaches that target growth at distal sites. Metastasis, which remains incompletely characterized at the molecular and biochemical levels, is a highly specific process in which the origin of the primary tumor seems to determine which distant organs will be colonized. Our studies have been based on using originally circulating breast cancer cells as a model to recapitulate an advanced state of disease progression. Strikingly, using this model, we and others have found that genes and proteins expressed by the metastatic cells differ depending on the type of tissue (e.g. brain versus the other sites) in which the metastasis arises, indicating that the tumor cells adapt to the new environments or are selected for successful proliferation there.