Priority Program
Colonization and interaction of tumor cells in the bone microenvironment
News & Blog
BACK INTO ACTION – Great to meet our new µBone family on our fourth Retreat in Dresden!
On April 04-06, 2023, we met in Dresden at Hotel Elbflorenz for our 4th µBone Retreat. Since we were not able to meet face-to-face for the last two years, [...]
On the importance of presentation skills in scientific careers and why you should invest in them
Andy Göbel, group leader and presentation trainer Developing excellent presentation skills is becoming increasingly important in science. This is not surprising given the number of talks you listen to [...]
Our way to cancer research and the µbone consortium
Arwin Groenewoud and Felix Engel, UK Erlangen Traditionally, we are working on heart development and regeneration as well as cardiac tissue engineering, focusing on methods to get cardiomyocytes to [...]
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.