Priority Program
Colonization and interaction of tumor cells in the bone microenvironment
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Hurdles of the pandemic
Vera Labitzky, UKE, Hamburg The second year of my first PostDoc position has just started, the practical experiments in various projects are in full swing, the project student registered [...]
Clinical Scientists: Combining excellent science with clinical work
Clinical Scientists bring urgent clinical questions to the laboratory. They play a key role in transferring the knowledge gained from basic research to health care and are essential for innovations at the bedside. Microbone supports people who implement scientific progress and translational implications quickly and in the best interests of the patients.
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.