Priority Program
Colonization and interaction of tumor cells in the bone microenvironment
News & Blog
From bench to bedside
by Isabel Ben Batalla and Janik Engelmann (AG Loges) – II. Medical Clinic and Institute of Tumor Biology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE). Cancer research has made tremendous progress [...]
Second Dresden µBone Conference – focus on bone colonization by tumor cells
Over 70 scientists from Germany’s top institutions in bone and cancer research attended the second µBone conference in Dresden on February 26-28, 2020. An interactive program of lectures, discussion [...]
The fat is always a bad guy…even in bone metastases
Aline Bozec, Tobias Bäuerle, Universitätsklinikum Erlangen
Towards a better understanding of bone metastasis
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Despite medical progress in the treatment of the primary tumor, most patients suffer and die from metastases at distant locations, such as bone. In contrast to most soft tissue metastases, bone metastases frequently lead to fractures, pain and a poor life quality.
Once established, bone metastases represent a point of no return and are rarely curable. They are even also regarded as a new source for systemic relapse. A better mechanistic understanding of this critical step of tumor progression is essential to target bone metastases, independent of the type of primary tumor.
The key steps of bone metastasis, including the initial colonization of bone by tumor cells and the early interaction with bone cells need to be better understood.
Thus, the fundamental questions
of our consortium are
To obtain mechanistic insights into these questions, the consortium focusses on breast and prostate cancer, reflecting the most common malignancies of women and men with a high propensity for bone metastases.
The µbone consortium will include myeloma bone disease as a prototypical malignant bone microenvironment disease to gain essential lateral insights into osteolytic bone lesions, which are a hallmark of myeloma. The researchers will jointly tackle the knowledge gap on bone metastases and reveal innovative mechanistic concepts of bone-tumor interactions (as a starting point) for subsequent studies to prevent or cure bone metastases.