Cancer researchers receive nearly $9 million for new five-year study.
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Molecular Genetics Professor Michael Ostrowski is the program director of a new five-year, $8.6 million National Cancer Institute grant, which begins September 2004. He is one of three Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers who will study the role of non-cancer tumor cells that have direct contact with cancer cells in helping the disease progress.
Ostrowski is also a co-principal investigator on the grant, along with his colleagues, Charis Eng, the Dorothy E. Klotz Chair of Cancer Research and the director of the clinical cancer group and Gustavo Leone, an assistant professor in molecular virology and in molecular genetics.
The researchers will focus on the tumor microenvironment in breast cancer progression, although the study’s findings might apply to any cancer of epithelial tissue, including prostrate, lung, colon and liver.
“The role of the microenvironment in tumor progression is an emerging area of research that clearly has important clinical implications, both for the diagnosis and treatment of human carcinoma, “Ostrowski said.
Ostrowski, Eng and Leone will each direct one of three projects addressing the idea that genetic alterations in non-cancerous cells located next to tumor cells directly contribute to how the cancer progresses.
If their theory proves correct--that a tumor relies on non-tumor cells for recruiting blood vessels and for spreading throughout the body--it could change current beliefs about how breast cancer grows.
It would also help researchers identify new targets in non-cancerous cells for the development of the next generation of chemotherapeutic agents, as well as provide new animal models that more closely resemble human disease progression.
“Current cancer therapies target genetic changes in the tumor itself,” Ostrowski said, “But epithelial tumor cells don’t have the capacity to grow and spread on their own, so they rely on other types of cells to do so.”
In normal breast development, for example, epithelial cells branch out by tunneling through another layer of cells. But epithelial cells can’t do this alone, so they recruit other cells that can burrow through tissue, with the epithelial cells ultimately filling in these tunnels.
“It’s become clear that there’s a very similar process in tumor development and progression,” Ostrowski said. “The tumor cells don’t act alone--they need other cells both for growth and for remodeling the tissue matrix before a tumor can really become a tumor.
“All of these cells talk to each other in a kind of network,” he continued. “During normal development, this network eventually shuts down. But that doesn’t happen in the tumor microenvironment.”
Originally published Autumn 2004
