Adhesion switches in cancer and development (ADHESWITCHES)
Integrins are the major family of transmembrane cell adhesion receptors controlling cell proliferation and migration. The objective of the ADHESWITCH project is to gain fundamentally novel mechanistic insight into the emerging new roles of integrins in cancer. The goal is to generate a road map of integrin-dependent pathways critical in branching morphogenesis, collective cell invasion, and integrin signaling in cancer, thus opening new targets for therapeutic interventions.
The projects are a combination of in vivo-based, clinically-linked translational approaches and cell and molecular biological studies aiming to identify entirely novel concepts in integrin function using cutting-edge techniques and synthetic biology tools.
ERC proof-of-concept Grant – 2015-2016
Breaking the Link betweeN myo10 and CancEr (BALaNCE)
The target of the PoC project is to establish the technical feasibility of inhibiting Myosin-X as potential cancer therapeutic and how to best exploit it. To achieve these targets, five Work Packages (WPs) have been defined and these involve various activities centered on the feasibility of Myosin-X inhibition as a viable anti-cancer strategy.