Biology and Vulnerabilities of Circulating Tumor Cells

A Lola and John Grace Distinguished Lecture in Cancer Research
This seminar will also be televised to CHUV/AGORA, Biopôle and Geneva University (rooms tbc)

Nicola is a Swiss National Science Foundation Assistant Professor of Oncology and the Group Leader of the Cancer Metastasis lab at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Recent discoveries of the Aceto lab include important insights into the biology and vulnerabilities of circulating tumor cell clusters (Gkountela et al., Cell, 2019, cover of the journal; Szczerba et al., Nature, 2019). Previously, Nicola worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Haber lab at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, MA, USA, where he identified circulating tumor cell clusters as metastatic precursors (see Aceto et al., Cell, 2014, Sarioglu and Aceto et al., Nature Methods 2015, Aceto et al., Trends in Cancer, 2015). He has also been an active member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, MA, USA, and a visiting scientist in the Clevers lab at the Hubrecht institute, the Netherlands. Nicola received a PhD summa cum laude from the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel, Switzerland with a thesis on protein tyrosine phosphatases and their role in breast cancer (see Aceto et al., Nature Medicine, 2012; Sun, Aceto et al., Cell, 2011). Nicola is an inventor on 10 patent applications related to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Upon starting the Cancer Metastasis lab, Nicola has been awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship, an ERC-Starting Grant, an honorable mention from AAAS/Science Translational Medicine as well as grants from the Swiss Cancer League, the ETH Zurich Personalized Medicine Initiative, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Union through the F.E.T-Open scheme, the Basel Cancer League and the University of Basel. For his previous work, Nicola has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation, EMBO, the American-Italian Cancer foundation, and the Human Frontiers Science Program. He also received an Ed Fischer Outstanding Thesis Award, a Bruno Speck Award from the Basel Stem Cell Network, and an abstract award from Harvard/MGH Cancer Center.
Nicola has been an invited speaker in a number of congresses, academic and industrial organizations, including the ETH Zurich, the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Lausanne, the Annual CTC and Liquid Biopsy Meeting in San Francisco, the European Society for Medical Oncology, the Swiss Re Forum on Cancer Diagnostics, the University of California Berkeley, Google[x] Life sciences, the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research, the World Circulating Tumor Cells Summit and the Gordon Conference in Mammary Gland Biology.