Grant: Project Grant

The majority of the patients suffering from cancer dies because cancer cells disseminate through the body to form metastases. This is a very complex process that is still not understood. In the hope to develop novel therapy to cure cancer, we need to better understand how a cell that became cancerous is also able to move out of the primary tumor to form metastases in distant organs. Our two laboratories discovered a novel mechanism that cancer cells could use to migrate and form distant metastases. We found that G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) activate ERM proteins, a family of key metastatic determinants. The goal of this project is to understand how these proteins talk to each other in order to facilitate cancer cell metastasis.