Drug Discovery Seminars
9:00 AM to 10:00 AM | January 22, 2016

Designer niches for analyzing cancer: From initiation to metastasis

Forum Hall, Palmer Commons
Audience This is a public event.
Abstract

Systems and strategies for promoting tissue growth provide enabling technologies for either enhancing regeneration for diseased or injured tissues, or to investigate abnormal tissue formation such as cancer. Given the complexity inherent in tissues, my laboratory is working towards the concept of "Systems Tissue Engineering", which indicates the dual need i) to develop systems capable of presenting combinations of factors that drive tissue growth, as well as ii) to incorporate systems biology approaches that can identify the appropriate combination of factors. Biomaterial scaffolds represent a central component of many approaches and provide the enabling tools for creating an environment and/or deliver factors that can direct cellular processes toward tissue formation. We have developed scaffolds that are capable of capturing early metastatic cells, which can also reduce the burden of disease, and have been investigating the mechanisms by which the scaffold influences disease progression. 



The ability to identify factors from amongst the complex biological milieu that are determining cell fate has been the focus of our systems biology efforts. We have developed a cellular array for the large scale profiling of transcription factor activity throughout the duration of in vitro culture, which we propose can identify the factors necessary to drive cells towards the desired phenotype. This array represents a novel systems biology tool for molecularly dissecting cell fate decisions. 

About the Speaker

Lonnie Shea, Ph.D.
William and Valerie Hall Chair and Professor
U-M College of Engineering
Lonnie Shea is a Professor of Chemical and Bioengineering at the University of Michigan. He frequently collaborates with his wife, Jacqueline Jeruss, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Surgery at the U-M Medical School. They collaborated to create the implantable “cancer magnet” to diagnose the presence of circulating cancer cells. The future is bright for using this rapid detection technology to enable earlier cancer detection and to better understand the cellular misregulation that is causally related to metastatic cancer.