Most people who die from cancer often do so because the cancer spreads to other parts of the body in a process called metastasis. Finding ways to stop cancer from spreading is key to saving more lives. Currently, there aren’t many treatments that focus specifically on preventing this spread. One reason is that the mutations in DNA that cause a tumor to form in the first place do not tell us if it will eventually become metastatic. In fact, cells with the same oncogenic DNA mutations can form a wide spectrum of lesions in humans, from benign growths to aggressive invasive tumors. 

To gain the ability to migrate and invade other tissues, cancer cells often hijack normal developmental processes. However, we still don’t fully understand how cancer cells turn on these migration processes, which are usually only active for short periods during early stages of life, and keep them active to spread throughout the body. Some research suggests that signals from the environment surrounding the cancer cells can “lock in” certain invasive gene expression changes. Yet, we still don’t know why only some of the exposed cells become dangerous, or how exactly this happens.

When a cell gets "locked in" to a particular way of functioning, we often refer to this as a state of the cell. Just as H2O can change states in response to environmental temperature--from hard ice, to flowing liquid water, to gaseous steam--cancer cells can undergo changes in the arrangement of their internal molecules to change their properties. The Fraley Lab is interested in understanding how mutated cancer cells change their state--from benign, to tumor forming, to invasive--in response to environmental cues.   

To study this, we are using both natural and synthetic hydrogels. Our goal is to understand how physical and biochemical cues influence cancer cell states and behaviors and then determine how closely these states and behaviors mimic cancer behaviors inside humans. Recapitulating clinically relevant cancer cell states "in a dish" enables us to identify novel therapeutic targets that prevent tumor progression and revert aggressive cancers into benign neoplastic lesions.    

Triple Negative Breast Cancer