Institute seminar November 18th 12:00 Kjetil Boye
The institute seminar on Wednesday November 18th will be held by Kjetil Boye from the Department of Tumor Biology
Title of his talk: "S100A4 and metastasis: molecular mechanisms and clinical implications"
The seminar will be in Auditorium (NB Not in Seminarroom 1!) and starts at 12:00
Abstract:
Distant metastasis is the main cause of death in patients with solid tumors, and the need for increased understanding of the metastatic process and the development of new anti-metastatic therapies is obvious. The focus of our research group is factors involved in the metastatic process, with an ultimate goal of identifying novel targets for therapy. Using human osteosarcoma cells, we have shown that the small, calcium-binding protein S100A4 promotes experimental metastasis in immunodeficient rats. Moreover, S100A4 stimulated tumor cell motility and invasion, and induced expression of a number of target genes previously implicated in metastasis. We have investigated the prognostic impact of S100A4 in several tumor types, and in a prospectively collected panel of tumor samples from colorectal cancer patients, nuclear expression was demonstrated to be a significant and independent predictor of adverse prognosis. Recently, S100A4 has also been identified as a key player in epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and associated with stem cell-like properties of tumor cells. In the future, S100A4 might be used as a prognostic or predictive factor to guide treatment decisions, or as a target for anti-metastatic therapy.
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