Matrix Biology

Conférenciers invités

SESSION I: Dynamics of ECM in tissue repair and regeneration

Sabine Werner
Title: Parallels between tissue repair and cancer: The fibroblast-matrix perspective Affiliation: ETH, Zurich, Switzerland

Sabine Werner studied Biochemistry at the Universities of Tubingen and Munich. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Munich, after having completed her dissertation in cancer research at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. As a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California San Francisco she worked on the molecular mechanisms of growth factor action with a focus on tissue repair. From 1993-1999 she was a group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried and from 1993-1999 also Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. She has been Full Professor of Cell Biology at ETH Zurich since 1999. The research of her laboratory focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms of tissue repair and the parallels to cancer. Sabine Werner is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the European Academy of Sciences (EurASc) and the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina).

Bénédicte Chazaud
Title: Different macrophage subsets control matrix remodeling during tissue repair and fibrosis during chronic diseases - highlights from the skeletal muscle
Affiliation: NeuroMyoGène Institute, University of Lyon, France

The aim of Dr Chazaud’s research is to understand the impact of the environment on stem cells during skeletal muscle regeneration in normal and pathological contexts. Particularly her lab has a strong focus on macrophages that play key roles in muscle regeneration by adopting sequential phenotypes and functions towards muscle stem cells, vascular cells and fibroblastic progenitors. Specific interactions macrophages develop with their neighborhood control myogenesis, angiogenesis and extracellular matrix remodeling during regeneration. The goal is to understand the molecular regulations of these interactions and how they are deregulated during muscle diseases.

KEYNOTE LECTURE

Suneel Apte
Title: Coupled genetics-degradomics for insights on cellular regulation by the matrix
Affiliation: Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland, Ohio

Suneel Apte studied medicine at the University of Bombay, India, and trained in orthopaedic surgery. He moved to St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1986, and completed a D. Phil. in Clinical Medicine with John Kenwright at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre. He undertook postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School with Bjorn R. Olsen before setting up his independent group at the Cleveland Clinic. The group investigates extracellular matrix and matrix-degrading proteases in development and disease using cell and molecular biology and proteomics. Major current activities are in cardiovascular and musculoskeletal diseases. He has served the matrix community as President of the American Society for Matrix Biology, current President of the ISMB and organized the 2013 Gordon Research Conference on Matrix Metalloproteinases and 2014 American Society for Matrix Biology Conference. His laboratory has been supported by the Allen Distinguished Investigator Program, the American Heart Association and National Institutes of Health.

SESSION II: Cancer ECM and tumor immunity

Emmanuel Donnadieu
Title: Live imaging of T cells and the extracellular matrix in tumors
Affiliation: Cochin Institute, University of Paris, France

Working in the field of immunology for more than 20 years, Dr. Donnadieu has accumulated thorough experience in cell signaling and cellular imaging related to T cell physiology. He is particularly well recognized in the field of T cell migration and the role played by external factors controlling this process. He has set up a novel experimental system of tissue slices which, combined with dynamic imaging, enables the visualization and tracking of T cells in human tumors. His major contributions were the demonstrations of a defect in T cells to infiltrate tumors and the role of matrix fibers in this process. His current projects aim at targeting the extracellular matrix of tumors to improve T cell-based immunotherapies.

Cathrin Brisken
Title: A special relationship with the matrix determines lobular breast cancer
Affiliation: EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Cathrin Brisken is internationally recognized for her work on endocrine control of mammary gland development and breast carcinogenesis. Dr. Brisken received her MD and her PhD degree in Biophysics from the Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany. She completed her postdoctoral work in cancer biology with Dr. R.A. Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA, USA. She previously held appointments at the Cancer Center of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston and the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC).
Research in Dr. Brisken’s laboratory focuses on the cellular and molecular underpinnings of estrogen and progesterone receptor signaling in the breast and the respective roles of these hormones and hormonally active compounds in carcinogenesis. The aim is to understand how recurrent exposures to endogenous and exogenous hormones contribute to breast carcinogenesis in order to better prevent and treat the disease. The laboratory has pioneered in vivo approaches to genetically dissect the role of the reproductive hormones in driving mouse mammary gland development and shown how they control intercellular communication. Dr. Brisken’s group has developed ex vivo and humanized mouse models using patient samples to study hormone action in human tissues in normal settings and during disease progression.

SESSION III: Mechanobiology, remodeling and ECM stiffness

Johanna Ivaska
Title: Unexpected paradigms in cancer mechanobiology
Affiliation: University of Turku, Turku, Finland

Johanna Ivaska is currently Finnish Cancer Institute’s K. Albin Johansson Research Professor. She is also a Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at Turku Bioscience Center at the University of Turku in Finland. She was nominated EMBO member and was invited to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in 2015. After obtaining her PhD at the University of Turku in 2000 she did a post-doc in the laboratory of Peter Parker in CR-UK London Research Institute. She moved to VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland to establish her research group “Cell adhesion and cancer” in 2003 and in 2013 moved to her current position in University of Turku. Her main research interests relate to the biological role of integrins in cancer progression. The current research focus areas are integrin mediated cell adhesion and migration, cell-matrix interactions and mechanosensing as well as molecular mechanisms governing endosomal traffic of integrins and growth factor receptors in cancer. Her research is currently funded by grants from the ERC (POC), the Academy of Finland and national foundations like the Sigrid Juselius Foundation and the Finnish Cancer Organization. She is a scientific editor for JCB (since 2016) and is on editorial and advisory boards of several journals such as Current Biology, Science Signaling, Cell Reports, J. Cell. Sci, Current Opinion in Cell Biology and Trends in Cell Biology.

Benoit Ladoux
Title: The impact of long-lived physicochemical footprints on cell migration paths.
Affiliation: Institut Jacques Monod, University Paris Diderot, France

Benoit Ladoux is a physicist by training who started his career on cell mechanics at the University Paris Diderot in the laboratory Matière et Systèmes Complexes. In 2008, he was involved in the creation of the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI) directed by MP. Sheetz in Singapore. After spending two years in Singapore between 2010 and 2012, he came back to Paris and joined a biological Institute, the Institut Jacques Monod as a senior group leader together with a cell biologist, RM. Mège. From 2012 to 2018, he shared his time between Paris and Singapore. His research aims at understanding how cell-adhesion mechanisms are associated to mechanotransduction and driven by the mechanical properties of the cellular environment and how mechanosensing regulates cell behaviors and tissue homeostasis. His team developed various tools to analyze the mechanical responses of cells to the physical properties of the environment including rigidity and topography sensing. For instance, his team established that actin cytoskeleton can serve as a large-scale mechanosensing machinery in response to substrate stiffness by adapting its polarization. He studied the impact of substrate geometry, confinement, curvature on collective cell migration. His recent research focused on the analogy between cellular systems and active nematics, particularly in the context of cell extrusion and tissue segregation.

Farshid Guilak
Title: Chondrocyte mechanobiology: Making the best of a stressful situation
Affiliation: Washington University, St. Louis, US

Dr Farshid Guilak is the Midred B. Simon Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Washington University, Director of Research for the St. Louis Shriners Hospitals for Children, and co-director of the Washington University Center of Regenerative Medicine. His laboratory pursues a multidisciplinary approach for studying the mechanobiology of cartilage as a basis for developing new pharmacologic or cell-based therapies for musculoskeletal diseases, particularly arthritis. His most recent work has focused on combining genome engineering and synthetic biology to develop synthetic mechanogenetic gene circuits that respond to physical signals with prescribed therapeutic outputs. He is a Past-president of the Orthopaedic Research Society and currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biomechanics. He has won several national and international awards for his research as well as 4 separate awards for mentoring.

SESSION IV: Role of ECM in cell stemness and cell fate plasticity

Yekaterina A. Miroshnikova
Title: Mechanical forces and the nucleus: regulation of cell fate and integrity
Affiliation: Helsinki Institute of Life Science, Helsinki Finland and Laboratory of Molecular Biology NIDDK, NIH, USA

Miroshnikova lab studies how cells sense and integrate mechanical and chemical information from their environment to control cell state and behavior. They are particularly interested how the nucleus responds to mechanical signals to alter gene expression and chromatin architecture. Her interdisciplinary research combines scale-bridging tools ranging from tissue-level live imaging, mechanical manipulation, and various genomics approaches to nanoscale atomic force microscopy to understand fundamental principles of cell and tissue maintenance and how this regulation becomes perturbed with disease onset.

Marisa Faraldo
Title: The role of laminin-binding integrins in mammary gland development and in the control of mammary stem/progenitor cells
Affiliation: Curie Institute, Paris, France

The aim of Marina Glukhova’s lab is to characterize the molecular mechanisms controlling the functions of stem and progenitor cells residing in the mammary gland. In the last years the project of Marisa Faraldo in the team focuses on the role of the interactions of the mammary epithelium with the underlying basement membrane, in particular, those mediated by the laminin-binding integrins. Using transgenic mouse models and different cellular and molecular approaches they found that the lack of these integrins affects stem cells and results in impaired mammary gland development.

SESSION V: Trafficking and secretion of ECM components

Philippe Chavrier
Title: The protease-dependent invasion program of breast cancer cells
Affiliation: Curie Institute, Sorbonne University Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France

Chavrier lab investigates the role of invadopodia in tumor cells, which are identified as self-assembling, force-producing proteolytic cell-matrix contacts that promote matrix pore enlargement to facilitate tumor-cell invasion. Recently, they studied ECM degradation by tumor cells under nutrient-depleted conditions and found that matrix proteolysis increases by one order of magnitude upon amino acid and growth factor deprivation. This response requires the invadopodia components, TKS5 and MT1-MMP, and is controlled by mTOR. Their study uncovers a new mechanism whereby starvation leads to the repurposing of plasma membrane clathrin-coated pits into ECM-degradative assemblies to support tumor growth.

David Stephens
Title: Intracellular trafficking and processing of procollagen
Affiliation: School of Biochemistry, University of Bristol, UK

David did his PhD at St. George's Hospital Medical School (University of London) followed by postdoctoral research first with Prof. George Banting in Bristol and then with Dr Rainer Pepperkok at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. David's time there as an EMBO Long term fellow learning advanced light microscopy while working on COPII-dependent secretion. Following award of a MRC Fellowship in 2001, David started the lab in Bristol. In 2005, David secured a Senior Fellowship and took up his core academic post in Bristol in October 2010. David is a recognized expert in membrane and cytoskeleton dynamics having worked for many years on membrane trafficking, notably the mechanisms of ER-to-Golgi transport, and more recently on the formation and function of primary cilia. His lab is highly collaborative and integrates model systems including 3D cell cultures and zebrafish to examine the organisation and function of the mammalian secretory pathway in healthy cells as well as in disease states. David is an Editor for Journal of Cell Science, an affiliate of the bioRxiv preprint server, and an Advisory Board member for Review Commons. He is a member of UKRI-BBSRC Council, Faculty Research Director for the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Bristol. He tweets (mostly) about science @David_S_Bristol.