About the research

Breast cancers are among the most common cancers in women. The majority of breast cancers originate in the epithelium but have a tendency to undergo a transition from epithelial to a mesenchymal (EMT) phenotype that is capable of migrating through the body and metastasize elsewhere, an event that may change the metabolic profile of the cells. Development of effective chemotherapy drugs has proven difficult as thousands of genes and their functional products interact in hundreds of thousands of different ways inside every cell. Systems biology represents a novel approach to this problem where all known internal workings of cells are reconstructed in a computational model. This model can then be used to predict experiments to test new drugs against particular diseases, such as cancer. In order to derive an accurate computational model of cellular metabolism, extensive measurements of cellular metabolic activity is necessary. The Center for Systems Biology (CSB) has for the past year developed cell specific genome scale models based on transcriptomic and metabolomic data from distinct epithelial and mesenchymal phenotypes of a breast epithelial cell line. The current project aims to further develop these models by incorporating lipidomic data for both phenotypes as resent studies indicate that membrane reconstruction and lipid signaling may be crucial steps in the development of EMT. The project is based on 1) mass spectrometry method development to accurately quantify specific lipid groups in complex biological samples, 2) applying these methods to the epithelial and mesenchymal phenotypes to gain lipidomic profiles of the cells and finally 3) to incorporate these data into existing cell specific models of EMT.

See further details