Cancer cells undergo transformations to become metastatic, or capable of invading other tissues and traveling throughout the body. By studying this metamorphosis in detail, researchers hope to identify new therapeutic targets to interfere with this process and shut down cancer metastasis.
Cancer biologist Daniel Dickinson was recruited to the Department of Molecular Biosciences at The University of Texas, Austin, to study the cellular mechanisms of how cancer cells become metastatic. He was a postdoctoral fellow in cancer biology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and was recruited with the help of a First-Time Tenure-Track Award from CPRIT.
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Cancer cells undergo transformations to become metastatic, or capable of invading other tissues and traveling throughout the body. By studying this metamorphosis in detail, researchers hope to identify new therapeutic targets to interfere with this process and shut down cancer metastasis.
Cancer biologist Daniel Dickinson was recruited to the Department of Molecular Biosciences at The University of Texas, Austin, to study the cellular mechanisms of how cancer cells become metastatic. He was a postdoctoral fellow in cancer biology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and was recruited with the help of a First-Time Tenure-Track Award from CPRIT.
Dickinson primarily studies the so-called “polarity” of cells. Virtually every cell in the human body, with the exception of red blood cells, is different on one side from the other. Every cell has to have polarity in order to carry out its basic functions. For example, cells in the lining of the stomach have an inside and an outside, which allow molecules to be transported in one direction or the other. Nutrients flow from the stomach into the body and digestive enzymes are secreted into the stomach.
“You could imagine that if it went the other way around, you could end up with all sorts of unpleasant things, like ulcers, for example,” Dickinson says.
The cells that line the stomach, intestine, lung, and skin are called epithelial cells. Most human cancers arise in these epithelial cells, and Dickinson says that in many cases, the initial development of a tumor stems from an overgrowth of epithelial cells.
“Those initial tumors almost never kill people,” he says. “The majority of fatalities in cancer patients are caused by metastasis, the spreading and invasion of cancer into the surrounding tissue.”
Dickinson says one of the hallmarks of metastasis is when epithelial cells lose their polarity; their “inside-outside” differentiation disappears. He studies this transformation using a model system of colonies of epithelial cells grown in a three-dimensional matrix.
One cell on its own in the matrix doesn’t have any polarity, but once it divides a couple of times — reaching a size of four cells — the groups of cells form little soccer-ball shapes and begin to have a defined “inside” and “outside.” Dickinson uses high-resolution microscopy to study this development of normal polarity.
In his model system, he can introduce cancer-causing genes into the cells. “When we do that, basically the cells freak out and start growing like crazy,” he says. “They lose their epithelial structure and start invading the matrix.” This loss of polarity can also be studied using microscopy and biochemical techniques.
Dickinson says he’s learning both about normal structural transformations of cells but also about the biochemistry of abnormal metamorphoses. His long-term goal is to try to identify therapeutic targets that could possibly prevent metastasis, or even reverse it.
He says he appreciates the research environment at UT Austin. “The department here is the exact kind of environment I was looking for. It’s big, it’s diverse, and yet, with a lot of different kinds of research,” he says. “And at the same time, people are friendly and approachable in ways that I didn’t find at other places.” Dickinson juggled 10 different job offers before deciding on Austin, and says the CPRIT funding was a big part of helping him make the choice to come to Texas and to extend his studies of cell polarity to cancer research.
Dickinson studied biochemistry at Iowa State University and, after a year in Switzerland as a Fulbright Scholar, received his Ph.D. in cancer biology from Stanford University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at North Carolina beginning in 2011.
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