Interfering with breast cancer metastasis

Nancy Hynes and her group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research have discovered an important mediator of breast cancer metastasis. The protein called Memo is not only required for cell migration and invasion, it is also an excellent prognostic marker for poor patient outcome and points the way to new therapeutic approaches. Thanks to the tremendous advances in breast cancer therapy in the last twenty years, patients no longer invariably die from the primary tumor in the breast but rather from metastases, cancer cells spreading to other locations. This is good news for many, but it also brought to the limelight the relative lack of understanding of the proteins and signaling cascades involved in metastasis. A better understanding of the processes controlling cancer cell motility and invasion is clearly needed to develop new anticancer approaches. Nancy Hynes, Group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, and her team have identified and further characterized a protein called Memo, which plays an essential role in the formation of breast cancer metastasis. In their study published in Science Signaling they showed that Memo is required for cell migration and invasion.