The Department of Biological Sciences is pleased to present a seminar by Siyuan Zhang, the Nancy Dee Assistant Professor of Cancer Research at the Harper Cancer Research Center and the University of Notre Dame. The talk, “Unraveling the Cellular and Behavioral Dynamics During Cancer Metastasis,” will take place on Tuesday, October 7 at 4:00 p.m. in 283 Galvin Life Science.
Cancer is not a disease of isolated individual tumor cells; rather, cancer is a multicellular organism that develops and evolves through constant interactions between cancer cells and the tumor microenvironment (TME). Beyond the traditional cancer cell-centric view of tumor development, it is increasingly appreciated by cancer researchers that TME components – e.g. immune cells, cytokines as well as mechanical components of cells – are not innocent bystanders to a neighboring outlaw, but are more often co-conspirators in the malignant progression. With consideration of the evolving transcriptome and selection pressures imposed by TME, the evolutionary view of cancer development has emerged as the forefront of current cancer research, which is rapidly reshaping the traditional paradigm of how we view the etiology of cancer and how we design effective therapeutics. The central theme of my research program is to explore the co-evolution between tumor cells and tumor microenvironment in its native tissue context (in situ). In this seminar, I am going to present an intriguing interplay between metastasis tumor cells and their metastatic microenvironment. The mechanistic insights derived from our study will pave the road for novel and more effective anti-metastasis treatment.
Originally published at biology.nd.edu.