Understanding and Targeting Breast Cancer Metastasis-Initiating Circulating Tumor Cells and Niches
Abstract
One of the biggest challenges in breast cancer is how to prevent and treat metastasis. Our main goal is to identify cell intrinsic and extrinsic metastasis-promoting mechanisms and develop novel therapeutics for targeting metastasis. We aim to investigate the molecular and physical properties of metastasis-initiating circulating tumor cells (CTCs), the unique properties of metastasis-supporting niches, and the mechanism of immune evasion in CTCs. This past year is the second year of this funding award, and the COVID-19 pandemic still had a significant negative impact on our research activities. Despite the challenges, we still made progress in analyzing CTC heterogeneity in morphology and transcriptomes at the single cell level in our existing patient-derived CTC lines, collection of the spatial transcriptomic profiling samples for PDX tissues, as well as investigation of the mechanisms of hypoxia mediated inhibition of CTC intrinsic interferon and antigen presentation signals.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 2023
- Accession Number
- AD1205622
Entities
People
- Min Yu
Organizations
- University of Southern California