Dr. Gopal Iyer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Oncology at UW-Madison, will present a talk about his work entitled, “Heterotrimeric-G protein subunit is a determinant for lung-brain metastasis.” Read more about Dr. Iyer’s work here.

Dissemination of tumor cells from the primary site of the lung to distant sites in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is poorly understood. With distinct mutation signatures in patients, altering pathways is critical to preventing tumor cell dissemination to distant sites. Towards this, we characterized 21 “trios” patient-matched brain metastases (BT), primary tumors (LT), and normal samples (LN), revealing a pattern of extracellular matrix remodeling which suppressed immune cell infiltration. Our objectives were to (i) determine if clinically sampled primary lung tumors encode gene expression patterns distinct from normal tissue, suggestive of increased tumor invasiveness including brain metastasis (ii) determine the biologic underpinning of immune-suppressive information carryover from primary lung tumor to brain metastasis and (iii) determine if synchronous and metachronous (time to disease) clinically sample brain metastases tumors converge on a common signaling mechanism. All these mechanisms seem to pinpoint to a G-protein subunit that could acta a signal transducer to drive migration.

The presentation will begin at 4:00 PM in Lapham N101, preceded by an informal Q&A from 3:45 – 4:00 PM.