Events

Bioengineered Models of Breast Cancer Dormancy

Biomedical Engineering
Lecture / Panel
 
Open to the Public
Shelly Peyton PhD
Zoom

Speaker:

Shelly Peyton PhD

Chair, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Tufts University

Abstract:

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the USA. Although advances in treatment over the past several decades have significantly improved the outlook for this disease, most women who are diagnosed with estrogen-receptor-positive disease remain at risk of metastatic relapse for the remainder of their lives. The cellular source of late relapse in these patients is thought to be disseminated tumor cells that reactivate after a long period of dormancy. The biology of these dormant cells and their natural history over a patient’s lifetime is largely unclear. Research on tumor dormancy has been significantly limited by the lack of clinically relevant models. In this talk, Dr. Peyton will discuss existing dormancy models, gaps in biological understanding, and her current research to overcome this problem. Her lab's unique approach is using its engineering expertise to build simplified models of human breast cancer with synthetic biomaterials. They use these systems to understand 1) the physical relationship between metastatic breast cancer cells and the tissues to which they spread, 2) the role of the extracellular matrix and its dynamics in drug resistance, and 3) how to create bioinspired, mechanically dynamic and activatable biomaterials.

Dr. Peyton received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2002 and went on to obtain her MS and PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Irvine in 2007. She was then an NIH Kirschstein post-doctoral fellow in the Biological Engineering Department at MIT before starting her academic appointment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2011, moving to Tufts University in 2024. Her work has earned her the honors of a 2013 Pew Biomedical Scholar, a New Innovator Award from the NIH, and a CAREER grant from the NSF. Shelly is a fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society and a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Peyton_Abstract
Disseminated breast cancer tumor cells may grow into detectable metastases, reach an equilibrium in tumor dormancy, become single-cell dormant or senescent, or die. Both dormancy and senescence are marked by cell cycle arrest, but senescence is associated with increased β-galactosidase (β-gal) activity and expression of a senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), whereas dormancy is associated with reduced expression of PI3K-AKT, an increase in the ratio of phosphorylated p38 to phosphorylated ERK expression, and potential for relapse.