Removing bottlenecks to metastatic cancer through biophysics

As recent as 2008, scientists discovered that cancer cells follow six modes of invasion. In his study, Sun observed five of them in breast cancer cells. A single cell can make all five modes. The sixth one, the nuclear piston model, is the most elusive. Sun and his team searched for a hub of activity where cells were transitioning in order to stabilize or block it in order to inhibit its movement and ensure it traveled on the same predictable path.

“Now we understand which language the cells are speaking,” said Sun, a theoretical physicist by training who recently refocused his research toward biophysics, a rare and formidable feat. If scientists can inhibit a cell’s path and switch it into another migration phenotype, he explains, they can stop the cells from metastasizing. Cancer metastasis accounts for 90% of cancer deaths.

Sun and team looked for phenotype hubs where cells were transitioning in order to stabilize it and inhibit its movement.

“It is like a cell is traveling from China to Peru. We can now predict that path. We want to stop it there. We don’t want it going someplace else and metastasize.”

In July 2019, Sun received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Award totaling $740K for five years to support his project, “Understand the multiplexing and communication in multicellular sensory response.”

Sun is collaborating with researchers from Oregon State University’s College of Engineering, Arizona State, University of California, San Diego, and Northeastern University. Their work is supported by a SciRIS Award, the College’s Science Research and Innovation Seed program supported in part by generous alumni and friends, and grants from the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.