How to stop tumour cells from metastasising in colorectal cancer

Eduard Batlle

Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), Spain

More than two million new cases of colorectal cancer, the third most common cancer in the world, are diagnosed each year. Seventy per cent of diagnosed patients have a tumour located in the colon, which can be surgically removed. However, in one out of three patients who undergo this operation, the tumour eventually recurs and metastases develop, worsening the prognosis.

For this reason, it is essential to understand how primary tumour cells manage to hide and migrate to other organs, such as the liver or lungs, and generate metastases. This knowledge would open the door to the development of new therapies aimed at preventing recurrence in cancer patients.

In recent work, the project team has made significant progress in this direction. They have developed a mouse model that replicates human colorectal cancer, which in the current project will allow them to study the different states that metastatic cells adopt during their spread throughout the body and to understand the mechanisms that enable them to change their properties depending on the environmental signals they encounter. The ultimate goal is to develop new therapies that prevent the generation of metastasis in colorectal cancer.

Targeting the Seeds of Relapse in Colorectal Cancer: Residual Disease and the Fibroblast Niche

€499,400.00