Notch: lineage specifier, stem cell gatekeeper, oncogene and tumor suppressor
Event details
| Date | 07.12.2011 |
| Hour | 16:00 |
| Speaker | Dr Freddy Radtke |
| Location |
SV 1717 A
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Over the last decades it became clear that many of the signaling pathways known to be important during embryonic development – such as Wnt, Hh and Notch signaling - also play crucial roles in self-renewing tissues. Cancer can bee seen as a disease of perturbed self-renewal in homeostatic tissues. To maintain homeostasis of a self-renewing tissue (e.g. the blood, the skin or intestine), processes such as self-renewal versus differentiation or apoptosis versus proliferation have to be under stringent control. Disarray of these cellular processes results in sustained proliferation, evading cell death, loss of differentiation capacity, invasion and metastasis - all of which are hallmarks of cancer. Thus, it is not too surprising that these developmental pathways are often disheveled in cancer. In my lab we address how the deregulation of developmental signalling cascades mechanistically contributes to cancer and whether these pathways are suitable for targeted therapy.
In the past we focused our research mostly on the evolutionarily conserved Notch pathway, which regulates cellular processes such as cell fate decisions, proliferation, differentiation and self-renewal. Over the last 5-10 years increasing evidence was provided to show that Notch signalling plays an important role in multiple cancers as well as in the maintenance of cancer stem cells. Here I will discuss our contribution to understand the role of Notch signalling in several self-renewing tissues, how it may contribute to cancer development and progression and address whether it constitutes a valid target for drug development used in cancer therapy.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- M. Mary / H. Hirling