Biology and Vulnerabilities of Circulating Tumor Cells

A Lola and John Grace Distinguished Lecture in Cancer Research
Ordinarily this seminar will also be televised to AGORA + Geneva University => however at this time it will only be via ZOOM.

Nicola Aceto is Associate Professor of Molecular Oncology and Group Leader of the Cancer Metastasis Lab at the Institute of Molecular Health Sciences, Department of Biology of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich since 2021. Previously, he has been Swiss National Science Foundation Assistant Professor of Oncology at the University of Basel. Recent discoveries of the Aceto lab include important insights into the metastatic process, namely investigations of the biology and vulnerabilities of circulating tumor cell clusters (Gkountela et al., Cell, 2019, cover of the journal; Szczerba et al., Nature, 2019; Donato et al., Cell Rep, 2020) some of which already translated in clinical trials for patients with metastatic breast cancer.

The Aceto lab received three ERC Grants (StG 2015, PoC 2018, CoG 2020) and various awards related to their work on circulating tumor cells. Nicola obtained a PhD summa cum laude from the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, and he is an inventor in 10 patent applications related to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. His presentation at the Lola and John Grace Distinguished Lecture in Cancer Research will be centered around the role of circulating tumor cells in the metastatic process, particularly on recent (published and unpublished) discoveries and their implications for therapeutic strategies that aim at metastasis suppression.