One of the key unanswered questions in cancer biology is how cancer cells are able to move from a primary tumor to survive and grow in another place in the body—the process known as metastasis. It is the most dangerous phase of cancer progression for patients, as metastases are often incurable.
Now a physician-scientist who is an expert on how cancer cells metastasize has been recruited to the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell University. Dr. Filippo Giancotti, M.D., Ph.D., was recruited to the department of cancer biology with the help of a Recruitment of Established Investigators Award from CPRIT in 2016.
Dr. Giancotti’s research focuses on the cells that leave the primary tumor and seed other organs; particularly the phase when they invade a new organ and adapt to their new—often inhospitable—microenvironment. Understanding how these cells can survive, often for years, is a crucial step in identifying a therapeutic intervention.
His research has shown that some cancer cells are similar to normal stem cells. In normal organs, stem cells replenish differentiated cells—like red blood cells from bone marrow stem cells—after the normal death of cells. Stem cells are normally dormant for a period of time, and then reactivated when they are needed.
In cancer, these stem cells also remain dormant for some time—months, or even years—after they metastasize. But when they are reactivated, metastatic tumors begin to grow. Dr. Giancotti wants to learn exactly how these dormant cells are reactivated.
Knowing how they reactivate could eventually lead to finding a drug to prevent it. His research spans breast, prostate, and pancreatic cancers, as well as multiple organs, like bone and brain, that are often targets of metastases.
Other areas he focuses on are how cancer cells disengage from the primary tumor and how they attach to a new site. He’s also studying the NF2 gene, which ordinarily suppresses tumor growth, but when it’s mutated, allows tumors to begin growing. This is a gene that is mutated in certain childhood tumors, like Schwannomas, as well as in a rare lung cancer caused by asbestos exposure, called mesothelioma.
Dr. Giancotti says a unique strength of his lab is that he uses multiple approaches to study the origin, progression, and metastasis of cancer: mouse genetics, genetic screens, and biochemistry, as well as imaging. Also, he says, “I am a physician-scientist, not just a scientist, so I always have an eye on the translation of my research into patient care.”
Because of the large volume of cancer patients at MD Anderson, Dr. Giancotti says he has access to many more patient samples and large data sets than he did at Sloan-Kettering. He says that having access to the UT Institute for Applied Cancer Science, where scientists are developing small molecules and antibodies against different cancer targets, means findings from the lab can move quickly into clinical trials.
“The translation of what we find in the lab into patient care is much easier here than it might be anywhere else,” he says.
Dr. Giancotti was educated at the University of Torino, School of Medicine, in Italy, where he received his M.D. as well as his Ph.D. in cell biology. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Sanford-Burnham Biomedical Research Institute, in La Jolla, Calif., before joining the faculty at New York University School of Medicine in 1991. He moved his laboratory to Sloan-Kettering and joined the faculty at Cornell in 1996.
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