Speaker
Description
A broad range of biological processes such as morphogenesis, tissue regeneration, and cancer invasion depend on the collective migration of epithelial cells. Guidance of collective cell migration is commonly attributed to soluble or immobilized chemical gradients. I will present novel mechanisms of collective cellular guidance that are physical in origin rather than chemical. Firstly, I will focus on how the mechanical interaction between the tumor and its stroma guides cancer cell invasion. I will show that cancer associated fibroblasts exert a physical force on cancer cells that enables their collective invasion. In the second part of my talk I will focus on durotaxis, the ability of cells to follow gradients of extracellular matrix stiffness. Durotaxis is well established as a single cell phenomenon but whether it can direct the motion of cell collectives is unknown. I will show that durotaxis emerges in cell collectives even if isolated constituent cells are unable to durotax. Collective durotaxis applies to a broad variety of epithelial cell types and requires the action of myosin motors and the integrity of cell-cell junctions. Collective durotaxis is more efficient than any previous report of single cell durotaxis; it thus emerges as robust mechanism to direct collective cell migration in development and disease.
Short CV:
Xavier Trepat received a BSc in Physics in 2000 and a B.Sc in Engineering in 2001. In 2004 he obtained his PhD from the Medical School at the University of Barcelona. He then joined the Program in Molecular and Integrative Physiological Sciences at Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2008 he became a Ramon y Cajal researcher at the University of Barcelona and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), and in January 2011 he became an ICREA Research Professor. Trepat’s research aims to understand how cells and tissues grow, move, invade and regenerate in a variety of processes in health and disease. To achieve this, he has developed and patented different technologies to measure cellular properties at the micro- and nanoscales. He has then applied these technologies to identify fundamental mechanisms in cell biology and biophysics.
Since his return to Spain from the USA in 2008, his research at the intersection between life and physical sciences has attracted ample support from the most prestigious funding agencies; Trepat is the one of the very few researchers in Europe ever to be awarded three grants from the European Research Council (ERC), one Starting, one Consolidator, and one Proof of Concept. He is also one of the few researchers – if not the only one – to ever publish his work as main author in five Nature family journals, namely Nature, Nature Physics, Nature Materials, Nature Methods, and Nature Cell Biology. The diversity of these journals captures the broad spectrum of topics in his laboratory. He has been awarded the Banc de Sabadell Award for Biomedical Research in 2015.
