Better understanding of the plasticity of metastatic tumour cells to combat breast cancer

Roger Gomis

Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), Spain

In most cases of breast cancer, the most frequent cause of mortality is not the primary tumour, but the metastases that develop in other organs. For a long time, it was believed that breast cancer cells escaped from the primary tumour and spread throughout the body to metastasise. However, recent genomic studies have determined that most metastases are produced by cells that escape from metastatic tumours that have developed in the bone, rather than by cells from the primary tumours, in a cascading process.

For tumour cells to colonise a distant tissue or organ, they require great plasticity to successfully adapt to new environments. Understanding the mechanisms that enable them to produce new metastases is crucial for designing targeted therapies to block these processes and thus prevent metastasis from spreading. In this project, the team will further study the factors that confer plasticity to metastatic tumour cells and seek new ways to inhibit such plasticity, aiming to slow down the process of secondary metastasis development and prevent deaths associated with breast cancer metastasis.

• Aleix Prat, Hospital Clínic Barcelona, FRCB-IDIBAPS, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain

Mapping metastasis plasticity

€664,165.90