Georgetown Lombardi Visiting Professor and Grand Rounds Lecture Series: “Cancer Cell State and the Tumor Microenvironment Coordinately Regulate Breast Cancer Metastasis”
Title: “Cancer Cell State and the Tumor Microenvironment Coordinately Regulate Breast Cancer Metastasis”
Presented by:
Andrew Ewald, PhD
Virginia DeAcetis Professor, Department of Cell Biology
Director, Giovanis Institute for Translational Cell Biology
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Location:
Held in-person in the New Research Building Auditorium with Zoom joining option.
Sponsor: Joyce Slingerland, MD, PhD
Lecture Series Presented by Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center
About the Speaker:
The Ewald Lab seeks to understand how groups of cells cooperate, compete, and interact to organize tissue architecture and function during development and disease progression. Our foundation is understanding of normal organ architecture and development: how are they built during early development and then remodeled during adult life? Our disease focus is on breast cancer and specifically on elucidating the cellular strategies and molecular mechanisms driving metastasis. Metastasis is the multistep process by which cancer cells acquire the ability to leave the primary tumor, travel through the circulation, evade the immune system, and establish new tumors in distant vital organs. More than 90% of cancer deaths are attributable to metastasis across all organ sites. Unfortunately, few approved drugs specifically target the metastatic process and current therapies are insufficiently effective for patients with metastatic cancer.
We recognized that major progress in understanding and treating metastatic cancer would require fundamentally new experimental tools and research ecosystems. We, therefore, developed new approaches that allowed us to culture live tumor tissue in the laboratory. We grow cancer cells in three-dimensional (3D) environments customized to model specific stages in cancer progression, including tumor initiation, tumor growth, cancer invasion, entry into blood vessels, immune evasion, and growth of metastases in distant organs. Recent advances in laboratory automation and image analysis enable us to conduct these experiments at a large scale in a short time period, for example testing the effect of 1,000 drugs on metastasis initiation within a week. We combine cutting-edge microscopy, advanced genetics, next-generation bulk and single-cell sequencing, and bioinformatic analysis to understand how cells accomplish specific steps in metastasis, define the molecular tool-kit they utilize, and identify targets for new anti-metastatic drugs. View more information.