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My name is Arthur Lambert, most people call me Artie. And I'm a post-doc here in the Weinberg
Lab at the Whitehead Institute in MIT. We're interested in cancer progression, so how tumors
disseminate from a primary site, say something like a breast or a prostate, and how these
tumor cells travel out from that initial primary tumor and see distant organs in the body.
I grew up in New Hampshire, I went to the University of New Hampshire for undergrad.
But growing up I would say that education was stressed. So, my father is a surgeon,
and actually his specialty is surgical oncology. You know, I think that sort of piqued my interest,
but as I went sort of my college courses I got more and more interested in sort of the
biochemical aspects of disease. And a lot of that actually had to do with a class I
took on, on cancer. It was a class I took called the Biochemistry of Cancer. And I found
it completely fascinating that we could understand a complex disease like cancer at the biochemical
level, by looking at individual proteins and DNA sequences. And so that really captures
my attention and, and sort of set me on this path. So here we focus on breast cancer, so
the primary tumor is gonna originate in the breast. We know a little bit of how it can
get to, say, the lung, the liver, or the brain but at that point we don't know very much
about how it can grow a new tumor there. And so I find that aspect to be quite fascinating.
You know, the actual process, what we call it is colonization. The process of a disseminated
tumor cell growing a new tumor in a distant organ. And, and we know next to nothing about
that. And so like 80% of human cancers come from epithelial cells, these are cells that
have really tight junctions. These are cells that line the outside of our body, and also
internal cavities. It's the process by which these cells sort of break away these connections
and travel out on their own. And so a lot of the questions that we ask here relate to
the molecular and cellular aspects of the EMT program. How it occurs, what proteins
are involved, if we can sort of block this process or interrupt it to prevent cancer
metastasis. And we can take turn on and off individual genes and, and evaluate their role
in this process. And so, what I'll do if I'm interested in the gene, say, is we can take
a tumor cell line that's growing in a dish, that say has this gene. And I can deliver
to that cell a virus, carrying a sequence of DNA that specifically designed to turn
off that, that gene. And in doing so we can remove that from these tumor cells. I can
remove that from these tumor cells, and then study the outcomes of this. Say, is it still
metastatic, or does it still form a tumor. So we work in here cause like, it's pretty
much just happy home for bacteria, this like media. And so the hoods provide a sterile
environment for us to work so. Pull them out and look underneath a microscope. So one of
the things that's certainly powerful are like cell biological techniques. Meaning we can
look at these cells underneath a microscope, we can look at where these proteins are localized
and how they function within the cell. And then we also take biochemical approaches so
we can sort of lyse the cell. What that means is break it apart, and take out it's individual
components. Say, DNA, RNA and protein, and then we can analyze how, say, removing this
gene, or adding this gene affects signaling pathways and the proteins within the cell.
So I think that it can happen at both levels. We can look at the cellular level, intact,
and see how it behaves. And we can also break the cell apart and look at the individual
components and see how they behave as well. We work with various other colleagues, other
post-docs in the lab, other graduate students. How's it goin' Adam?
[Speaker 2:] Good how are you?
[Speaker 1:] You okay? That's Adam, I work with him. It's really a, a quite a diverse
group of people that are here. And you can get support from anyone in the lab, ask questions.
So for instance I'm sort of newer, I've been here for just over a year so I'll rely heavily
on, on those in my room and ask them, especially ask them questions. And almost everyone is
helpful. But it's definitely our hope that, you know, uncovering these biological mechanisms
will lead to new therapies, new drugs, that can hopefully prevent, you know, the, the
more deadly aspects of cancer. So if you step back and, and think about, that the proteins
you're studying are actually contributing in a meaningful way to cancer, and if you
can understand them, we can, we can some sort of progress in treating it I think is just
a fascinating proposition.