Arts and Events Calendar

USC has been selected to establish a $16 million cancer research center as part of a new strategy against the disease by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and its National Cancer Institute. The new center is one of 12 in the nation to receive the designation as a Physical Science-Oncology Center. During the five-year initiative, the Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers will take new, nontraditional approaches to cancer research by studying the physical laws and principles of cancer; evolution and the evolutionary theory of cancer; information coding, decoding, transfer and translation in cancer; and ways to de-convolute cancer’s complexity. As part of the outreach component of this grant, the Center for Applied Molecular Medicine is hosting a monthly seminar series.

This installment’s speaker is Sanjay Kumar, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Bioengineering, UC Berkeley.

From Dr. Kumar: “One of the most exciting breakthroughs in cell biology over the past decade is the recognition that micromechanical inputs to cells from the solid-state extracellular matrix (ECM), such as those encoded in ECM geometry, topography and elasticity, can influence cell and tissue physiology and pathology in profound and specific ways. This connection between mechanics and biology (mechanobiology) bears direct relevance to the pathogenesis of diseases of the nervous system in which cells alter their structure, motility or compliance, including neuronal and glial tumors and neurodegenerative disorders, and suggests that specific cell behaviors may be engineered by directly manipulating the underlying molecular systems. I will discuss efforts my colleagues and I have taken to harness the potential of mechanobiological crosstalk between cells and the ECM to understand and manipulate tumor and stem cell biology in the nervous system. I will describe studies in which we elucidate the role of physical cues from the ECM in driving cell structure, cytoskeletal organization, cell migration and proliferation in malignant brain tumors. I will also discuss our efforts to engineer the differentiation trajectories of neural stem cells by manipulating the biophysical properties of the ECM and the mechanotransductive signaling pathways that enable cells to mechanically communicate with the ECM.”