On Thursday 9 July 2020, H. Liu will defend her PhD dissertation, entitled: ‘Potential Determinants in Malignancy Growth, Angiogenesis and Metastasis’.
In general, cancer is an accumulation of abnormal cells with uncontrolled physiological behaviors, which causes millions of deaths worldwide. The cancer phenotype is the outcome of a combination of stimuli, inducers and suppressors, signal transduction pathways, and the resulting events, interweaving a function network. To this end, discovering more about the process of tumorigenesis and finding ways to block or inhibit tumor progression are, and will be, active research areas for a long time.
The tumorigenesis and progression of malignancy is intricate with composition of various genetic alterations and pathways regulating cell growth and death, differentiation, migration, invasion and interaction with tumor microenvironment. In this thesis, we linked phenotypic features with genetic modulators in melanoma and colorectal carcinoma to find potential intrinsic drivers of tumor progression. These drivers may serve as a target or inspire further development of therapeutic strategies in melanoma and colorectal carcinoma. We also described a novel tool to explore the dynamics of adherent cells, including cell invasion in a three-dimensional model. This model enables quantitative evaluation of multiple aspects of cell invasion and is reckoned to be a fast and highly reproducible method helpful in cell biology studies.
The PhD defences will not take place publicly in the Senate Hall or Professor Andries Queridoroom due to the coronavirus. The candidates will defend their thesis online.