Grant: Operating Grant

Our goal is to understand how killer cells or the "hit men" of the immune system find and kill virus infected cells or cancer cells within the body and eliminate them. We are trying to understand how killer cells move around to find infected cells and tumor cells, then once they find one, how they bind to it, deliver the lethal "hit" and then release from the dying cell to be free to find the next one to kill. We are studying the role of two related proteins, called paxillin and leupaxin, that are predicted to be important for allowing the killer cells to crawl around the body and bind to tumor cells. We have some evidence suggesting that paxillin is important for pointing the cellular lethal weapons towards the target cell to die. We propose to extend this to a model system to allow us to more fully dissect the contribution of paxillin to this process. Interestingly, tumor cells may use paxillin to help them move around the body during metastasis so our research may also provide insight into how cancer cells move to distant sites in the body.