ATG Newsletter 13 • December 2021
Part II. Knowledge Telmo Catarino
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e are proud to share the great scientific contributions of the GABBA students and alumni, since the last newsletter. Among the list of publications, there are several articles that were published in prestigious high impact journals (original publications as first or senior author) that we will highlight here. Oncobiology
Ana Luísa Correia recently published the work of her post-doc at Mohamed Bentires-Alj’s lab. In this newsletter, the 11th edition alumna told us about this project from the beginning. “I wanted to understand how breast cancer spreads to other organs. What really puzzled me was that while some patients develop metastatic disease soon after the primary tumor is found, others can go years or even decades before being diagnosed with metastasis. Many years of research have shown that at the root of this phenomenon are cancer cells that break away from the primary tumor and disseminate to other organs, where they remain dormant until they find themselves in growthsupporting conditions. Why these cells become dormant and what causes them to wake up are one of the most fundamental unsolved problems in cancer research.” In this work, she and her colleagues developed a molecular tool to follow dormant cancer cells in mice, with which she found that the liver was the tissue where they accumulated at the highest number. “This location was not surprising since the liver is one of the main sites of breast cancer metastasis. And because the liver is an essential organ, which is very difficult to treat, liver metastasis is a leading cause of death among breast cancer patients.” She found these dormant cancer cells are kept at bay by natural killer cells, showing that mice with enough natural killer cells in the liver would control the disease by inducing cancer cell dormancy. “But we know that the number of these cells can change, and the environment in each organ plays a critical role in this control.” In fact, they showed natural killer cell proliferation can be restricted by hepatic stellate cells, effectively limiting their number in the tissue. 16
