Event
Seminar: Keyue Shen (University of Southern California)
Friday, July 23, 2021
2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
Virtual
Xiaoming (Shawn) He
shawnhe@umd.edu
Join us on Friday, July 23, 2021 from 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. for a virtual seminar delivered by Professor Keyue Shen (University of Southern California).
“Metabolic and microenvironmental regulation of cancer and stem cells"
In vivo, tissue structure and local cell-cell/cell-matrix interactions define the
microenvironment and regulate a complex landscape of cellular phenotypes and metabolism in tumors and stem cell niches. Such dynamics and heterogeneity often contribute to treatment failures in cancer and regenerative medicine. Identifying the precise microenvironmental cues that trigger the phenotypic or metabolic changes will thus enable discovery of new targets for cancer or stem cell therapies. However, it is challenging to pinpoint such cues and track cellular dynamics/heterogeneity in a complex microenvironment in vivo. Our laboratory is focused on creating biologically inspired in vitro platforms to recapitulate the scale of cell signaling in tissue microenvironments from subcellular to tissue levels, and developing single-cell tools to enable dynamic, long-term tracking of metabolic heterogeneity and changes in rare cells. We have built in vitro hypoxic tumor models to recapitulate the metabolic landscapes in solid tumors, to determine/overcome the key factors that impedes the therapeutic efficacy of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. We have also developed micropatterned tumor models to understand the mechano-regulatory mechanisms and mito-nuclear communications in cancer metastasis. Using fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy, we created a set of non-invasive metabolic optical biomarkers to identify hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) from their progenitor counterparts and track their metabolic dynamics during cell division at the single-cell level. With a lipid bilayer model, we have further discovered a unique role of membrane-bound factors on niche stromal cells in determining the morphology and adhesive function of HSCs in the bone marrow. Our long-term goal is to develop novel strategies for cancer immunotherapy and bone marrow transplantation.
BIOE graduate students - check your email for the Zoom link for this seminar. If you have not received the meeting link and wish to attend this virtual seminar, feel free to email Dr. Xiaoming (Shawn) He at shawnhe@umd.edu, or Emily Rosenthal at erosent1@umd.edu.
