Improving cancer medicine with Medical and Life Sciences Research funding.

During cancer, cells divide and re-divide to form a tumour. This uncontrolled division causes the cells to compress within the tumour. This compression stress often results in altered cell-cell adhesion, causing the cells to leave the tumour, and spread to other parts of the body. The spreading of cancer is termed metastasis and is one of the leading causes of cancer related deaths. Over the years, we have identified the cell-adhesion proteins called cadherins which when present in cells help them to cement together. Cadherins in the cells interact with other adaptor proteins like catenins to strengthen the cell adhesion sites. Catenin links cadherins to the cytoskeleton protein actin. These protein associations are important for cell-cell adhesion maintenance. Though we have identified the proteins, we are still unclear on how the mechanical forces might affect the protein association and in turn affect the cell-cell adhesion in cancer cells. To study this, PhD student,  Sayantika Ghosh with colleagues at the University of Warwick Medical School have created a single-cell assay.  For this project, they want to exert different mechanical stresses on the single-cell assay to understand the role of the forces on cell-cell adhesion in cancer cells. The findings will help immensely to understand a key mechanism of cancer spreading improving massively our treatment and therapeutics in cancer medicine.