New technologies in cancer mechanobiology

Otger Campàs is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at UCSB where he holds a Mellichamp Chair in Systems Biology. His research group combines theoretical and experimental methods to approach a variety of problems related to morphogenesis and self-organization of living matter. Specifically, his group currently studies the role of mechanics in shaping embryonic tissues and organs, the relation between the genetic and mechanical control of morphogenesis, the mechanics of 3D multicellular aggregates and cell migration. Before arriving at UCSB in July 2012, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, working with Professors Brenner, Mahadevan and Ingber. Campàs received his BS in Physics from the University of Barcelona and completed his PhD in Biophysics at the Institut Curie (Paris), working under Jacques Prost, Jean-François Joanny, and Jaume Casademunt, studying how cellular movements and organization arise from the molecular forces generated by motor proteins and polymerization of cytoskeletal filaments. In 2008, he spearheaded a highly popular event titled, “Cooking and Science with Ferran Adrià” at Harvard University, and was later co-founder of the "Science and Cooking" course and lecture series at Harvard University. For more information about his research, please visit https://campas.me.ucsb.edu.

Joe holds a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell-Matrix Research (University of Manchester, UK). He is recognized for his post-doctoral work examining the effects of nuclear mechanical properties on the regulation of stem cells (Swift et al. Science 2013) and cell migration (Harada et al. J. Cell Biol. 2014), highlighting the key role of lamin proteins. He has developed applications of mass spectrometry proteomics to study whole-cell, nuclear and extracellular components (Swift et al. Nucleus 2013; Majkut et al. Curr. Biol. 2013). The recently established Swift lab currently examines how tissue mechanics and communication between cells and matrix change in ageing, applying combinations of biophysics and ‘-omics’ methodologies.

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Professor Guillaume Charras obtained an MSc in mechanical engineering from Ecole Centrale de Paris and Georgia Institute of Technology in 1997. He then went on to study for a PhD in biochemistry from UCL between 1999 and 2002. Professor Charras did a post-doc with Tim Mitchison at Harvard Medical School between 2003 and 2007. Since 2007, he has been a group leader at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, UCL.

Dr Cheema is a senior lecturer in tissue engineering, and head of education for the Division of Surgery at UCL. Her research interests include engineering vascular networks in 3D engineered tissues to further understand the role native matrix density and composition have on this biological process. Her research also focuses on controlling elements of collagen architecture to build biomimetic tissues in vitro. In particular, by studying mechanisms which control collagen fibril alignment, diameter and density. Her work on engineering tissues has resulted in the development of 3D in vitro models of solid tumours or tumouroids. Here the spatial architecture of a tumour and its surrounding stroma has been reproduced in vitro, with evidence of tumour invasion into surrounding 'normal' tissue. Engineered tumouroids include epithelial cancers and sarcoma's. Her collaborative work includes engineering basic tissue models which are subjected to decompression regimes to mimic the 'bends' in diving. Experimental data has been modeled to further our understanding of how bubbles nucleate, grow and coalesce in tissues during decompression.

Dr Fernando Calvo uses a wide range of techniques from conventional cell and molecular biology, to state-of-the-art intravital imaging of in vivo models and analysis of clinical material to study the role of the tumour microenvironment in cancer progression and dissemination. He obtained his PhD with Piero Crespo in Santander (Spain) studying Ras GTPases. He then carried out post-doctoral work in London (Erik Sahai) investigating the role of cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) in tumour progression and uncovered the importance of mechanotransduction in generating and maintaining the activated status of CAFs. In 2013 he set up his own group at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) before moving back to Spain in early 2017, where he leads a team at the Institute of Biomedicine & Biotechnology of Cantabria.

Already from his early days Gert-Jan Bakker enjoyed to reveal the unseen, by taking complex machines apart and creating new devices by re-assembling the collected bits and pieces. In 2011, he obtained his PhD in Biophysics at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. He currently works in the group of Peter Friedl at the Radboud Institute for Molecular Life Sciences (RIMLS, the Netherlands), where he is part of the preclinical and microscopic imaging centre. His current focus is development and application of novel intravital imaging strategies such as third harmonics generation microscopy, to visualize tumour cell dynamics into the context of their surrounding tissue structures in vivo. Other developments are the application of high-energy pulsed excitation sources, for deeper imaging of multiphoton excited fluorescently labelled tumour cells and their micro-environment. Furthermore, he is interested in the application of molecular probes and probes that measure physical properties within the tumour micro-environment.

Dr Jia received his BS in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University and PhD in electrical engineering with a minor in physics from Princeton University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. Dr Jia has been an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at SUNY Stony Brook since 2015. Dr Jia is an recipient of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award and NIH's MIRA Award for Early-Stage Investigators.

Xavier Trepat was trained in Physics and Engineering at the University of Barcelona. 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 January 2011 he became an ICREA Research Professor at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC). 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.

Claire Robertson is a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She studies regulation of extracellular matrix in breast development and cancer.

Chris Dunsby is a Reader with a joint post between Photonics, Department of Physics and the Centre for Histopathology, Department of Medicine at Imperial. His research interests are centred on the application of photonics and ultrafast laser technology to biomedical imaging with an emphasis on quantitative fluorescence imaging, and include light sheet microscopy, multiphoton microscopy, multiparameter fluorescence imaging and fluorescence lifetime imaging.

Murrell’s interests are in understanding the mechanical principles that drive major cellular life processes through the design and engineering of novel biomimetic systems. To this end, he develops simplified and tractable experimental models of the mechanical machinery within the cell with the goal of reproducing complex cellular behaviour, such as cell division and cell migration. Murrell then combines these ‘bottom-up’ experimental models with concepts from soft matter physics to gain a fundamental understanding of the influence of mechanics on cell and tissue behaviour. In parallel, he hopes to identify new design principles from biology which can be used to create novel technologies.

Associate Professor Daphne Weihs is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology since 2006. She obtained her BSc, MSc, and PhD (2004) at the Faculty of Chemical Engineering, Technion. She did her post-graduate research at the Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine, Medical School, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA, 2004–2006). Professor Weihs is the head of the Scientific Committee of the Israel Society of Medical and Biological Engineering (ISMBE) since 2015. Her focus is the mechanobiology of cells; the stiffness and dynamics of cells and their mechanical interactions with the microenvironment, in the contexts of cancer progression and in wound prevention and healing. She has recently developed a mechanobiology-based approach to diagnose cancer and predict metastases.

Susan is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Randall Centre for Biophysics at King's College London. Her research is centred around developing novel super-resolution microscopy techniques, and using them to investigate the cytoskeleton. The methods she developed have enabled localisation microscopy to be carried out routinely in live cells. In recognition of this Susan was awarded both the RMS Medal for Light Microscopy and the President's Medal of the Society of Experimental Biology for the Cell Section in 2015. Recently she has become interested in the fundamental limitations of super-resolution microscopy techniques, and how to make sure data is reliable and accurate.

Dr Lee received his MD PhD in Cell and Molecular Physiology and trained in Medicine. As a post-doc in Dr George Church’s laboratory at Harvard, he developed technologies to reconstruct transcriptome signatures with single-cell resolution in 3D to study cellular behaviour in their native environment. He joined CSHL in 2014, and his lab is primarily focused on how cell-cell interactions produce a gradient of transcriptionally competent states during embryo development and morphogen signalling, linking mechanotransduction, cell cycle progression and cell fate specification. To spatially reconstruct the genetic, epigenetic, and regulatory basis of embryonic development, the Lee lab develops various in situ sequencing, single-cell, and image reconstruction technologies.

Matthias Eibauer received his diploma in Physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Germany in 2007. In 2011 he obtained his PhD from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Germany, under the supervision of Professor Baumeister. Between 2011 and 2016, he was a postdoctoral fellow under the guidance of Professor Medalia at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Since 2016, Matthias has been a senior scientist at the University of Zurich.