Events Calendar

USC was 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. 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.

From Dr. Austin: "One of the purposes of the Physical Sciences Oncology Center effort is to try and introduce physics ideas into cancer in the hopes that physicists can transform the way we think about cancer. Special relativity in physics plays a seminal role in how we view the world: namely no frame of reference is special, and information can only be transmitted at a maximum speed in any frame. I will attempt to use some of these concepts to view the process of metastasis as an information wave moving through space, and discuss our experiments that view metastasis from the frame of reference of the invading cells."