Mechanobiological Regulation of Normal and Tumor Stem Cells in the Brain - joint IBI & ISREC seminar
Event details
| Date | 25.06.2013 |
| Hour | 09:00 › 10:00 |
| Speaker |
Prof. Sanjay Kumar, University of California, Berkeley Bio: Sanjay Kumar, M.D., Ph.D., was appointed Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley in 2005 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2011. He is also a Faculty Scientist in the Physical Biosciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Kumar and his research group have been fortunate to receive a number of honors, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), The NIH Director's New Innovator Award, The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Hellman Family Faculty Fund Award. Dr. Kumar has also received awards by student vote for Excellence in Graduate Advising (UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering) and Outstanding Teaching (Bioengineering Honor Society) and has served as a Presidential Chair Teaching Fellow. Work in his laboratory has been sponsored by grants and fellowships from NIH, NSF, DOD, AHA, CRCC, LBNL, The Beckman Foundation, the DOE Molecular Foundry and the University of California. Dr. Kumar earned a B.S. in chemical engineering (1996) from the University of Minnesota, where he studied lipid self-assembly in the laboratory of Matt Tirrell. He then moved on to Johns Hopkins University, where he earned an M.D. (2003) and a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics (2003) as a fellow of the NIH Medical Scientist Training Program. During the graduate portion of his training, he investigated the structure and energetics of neuronal intermediate filaments in the laboratories of Jan Hoh of the School of Medicine and Mike Paulaitis of the Department of Chemical Engineering. From 2003-2005, he served as an NIH research fellow with Don Ingber at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, where he examined the nanoscale mechanics and dynamics of cytoskeletal structures in living cells and developed nanomagnetic technologies to control receptor-mediated signaling. |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
It is now widely appreciated that the structure, dimensionality, and stiffness of the microenvironment can play important roles in regulating the self-renewal and differentiation of stem cells. However, the molecular mechanisms that underlie these effects and their significance in vivo remain significantly less clear. Here I will discuss our recent efforts to understand and dissect the contributions of physical microenvironmental signals to normal and tumor stem cell biology in the central nervous system. First, we have shown that extracellular matrix (ECM) stiffness strongly instructs lineage commitment in hippocampal adult neural stem cells, and that these signals are processed through the small GTPases RhoA and Cdc42 during a critical time window following ECM adhesion. Lentiviral injection studies reveal that activation of RhoA also substantially suppresses neurogenesis in vivo. Second, we have investigated connections between mechanosensing, invasion, and tumorigenesis in primary patient-derived human glioblastoma tumor initiating cells. We find that the adhesion and motility of these cells are surprisingly insensitive to ECM stiffness but can be rendered sensitive to this cue through pharmacologic or genetic induction of contractility. This intervention has the additional effect of severely restricting three-dimensional invasion in vitro and significantly extending survival and limiting diffuse infiltration in a mouse orthotopic xenograft model. These studies highlight the importance of the physical microenvironment in controlling normal and tumor stem cell behavior and support the notion that the underlying signaling systems may offer valuable molecular targets.
Links
Practical information
- Informed public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- Prof. Melody Swartz
Contact
- Institute of Bioengineering (IBI, Dietrich Reinhard)