Madrid Adventure to Study Autophagy in Melanoma Stem Cells
Posted by DavidHill, on 20 May 2016
I am hugely grateful to the Journal of Cell Science and the Company of Biologists for awarding me a traveling fellowship to visit the laboratory of Dr Guillermo Velasco at Complutense University in Madrid, Spain. During this visit I gained a greater understating of the skills and techniques used to manipulate autophagy regulatory pathways within melanoma stem-like cells, as well as knowledge of autophagy regulation within cancer.
Cutaneous malignant melanoma is the most aggressive form of skin cancer and despite the recent introduction of targeted therapeutics to treat the disease, relapse is common and there remains no effective cure for metastatic melanoma. Therefore, an improved understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms mediating development and progression of melanoma is desperately required. A potential therapeutic approach may be to target melanoma stem-like cells that sustain tumour growth and contribute to drug resistance. Stem-like progenitor cells from other cancers have been shown to use autophagy, the principle lysosomal mediated mechanism for the breakdown and recycling of damaged proteins, for survival. Therefore, as autophagy is also known to be important for melanoma growth, the current project aims to test the hypothesis that melanoma subpopulations that display a stem-like phenotype use autophagy for tumour maintenance, invasion and survival.
The trip to Dr Velasco’s lab allowed me to learn specific practical techniques for the identification and characterisation of cancer stem cells, as well as gain knowledge of autophagy regulation from experts in the field. During my time in Madrid I met a number of very interesting people who I hope will remain close collaborators in the future. Also, the experience of living and working in such a cosmopolitan city as Madrid is one that I can whole heartedly recommend to anyone!! It certainly is a fantastic city and I can’t wait until the next time I can visit.
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Hi David,
It was nice coming across your good testimonial as I was looking for travel fellowships. It must be amazing to work on autophagy that I had been interested since my initial college days that took me to Italy for 2 months to work on cancer and autophagy. After I read Dr. Velasco research papers in 2010, I wished to do PhD in his lab and was in contact with him. Unfortunately there was no funding that year due to Spanish economy that cost me offer in Barcelona too. Spain is amazing place and I just saw a documentary on Madrid. I narrowly missed out fellowship in Valenica that year. It must have been an amazing experience for you to work on autophagy in his lab. Perhaps I should give it a shot now through this travel fellowships that I heard of few days back. I am working on inflammatory bowel disease and hope to study role of autophagy in IBD as it’s one of the major players.
Wish you good luck in your future endeavors to carry out bright research in autophagy.
Cheers,
Naga