BME Seminar
Friday, February 21st, 2020
UTEB 150 at Storrs & Videoconferenced to UCHC CG-079B
12:00-1:00 pm
“Roles of the Extracellular Matrix in Driving Metastasis and Chemoresistance”
Presented By: Madeleine Oudin, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University
Abstract: The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a major component of the tumor microenvironment, where it can support cellular growth, promote local invasion from the primary tumor, and contribute to metastatic outgrowth in distant sites. Our research focuses on understanding how individual ECM proteins upregulated in metastatic breast tumors drive local invasion and support metastasis. Obesity is a systemic disease that causes chronic inflammation which can lead to ECM deposition in mammary tissues and is associated with increased metastasis. By performing proteomics of the obese mammary gland ECM and comparing it to the tumor ECM, we identified Collagen VI as a novel driver of breast cancer metastasis. We subsequently developed a computational pipeline to predict the effect of individual ECM proteins on cancer metastasis. Finally, we investigated how ECM proteins upregulated in metastatic tumors impact response to chemotherapy, drugs commonly used to treat metastatic breast cancer. We find that individual ECM proteins differentially impact response to drugs and that chemotherapy treatment alters the ECM composition of breast tumors, suggesting that the ECM may play a role in chemotherapy-induced metastasis. Overall, these studies further support the importance of the ECM as a key regulator of metastasis and drug resistance.
Biography: Dr. Oudin completed a BSc in Biochemistry at McGill University and a PhD in Neuroscience from King’s College London, UK, where she studied the regulation of neuronal cell migration. As a post-doctoral fellow in Prof. Frank Gertler’s lab at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, her research was focused on understanding how metastasis, the dissemination of tumor cells throughout the body, occurs and how aggressive cells become resistant to current treatments. She received a Breast Cancer Research Department of Defence Post-doctoral Fellowship and a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence from the National Cancer Institute. She started as an Assistant Professor at Tufts University in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2018, where her lab is focused on understanding the mechanisms by which the tumor microenvironment contributes to cancer metastasis and resistance to drugs. She has also received multiple awards, such as the Women in Cancer Research Award, American Association for Cancer Research Scholar-in-Training Award, the MIT Infinite Kilometer Award and CMBE Rising Star Award.
For more information, contact: Wendy S Vanden Berg-Foels at wendyv@engr.uconn.edu