BME7900 Seminar Series - Madeleine Oudin, PhD

Description

We welcome our next seminar speaker, Dr. Madeleine Oudin from Tufts University. Dr. Oudin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Engineered Models to Study the Role of the Tumor Microenvironment in Cancer Progression

Abstract: The tumor microenvironment, composed of stromal cells, the extracellular matrix (ECM) and nerves, plays a critical role in tumorignesis and local invasion, the first step of metastasis, the leading cause of death in cancer patients. Our research focuses on building engineered models to understand how components of the tumor microenvironment contribute to tumor progression. First, we developed a computational pipeline to predict the effect of individual ECM proteins on 3D invasion and cancer metastasis and optimized the use decellularized ECM scaffolds isolated from mice to evaluate whole tissue ECM effects on tumor cell proliferation and invasion. We used these methods to identify individual ECM proteins and their signaling pathways responsible for driving invasion in the context of obesity and drug resistance. Next, we investigated the role of sensory nerves, which are abundant in breast tissue, in driving local invasion, building 3D models of breast tumor cell-nerve interactions, to show that direct tumor cell-nerve interactions can drive invasion and metastasis via direct cell-cell contacts, changes in gene expression, and changes in electrical activity. Overall, our data support an important role for the ECM and nerves in driving breast cancer progression.

Bio: Madeleine completed a BSc in Biochemistry at McGill University, a PhD in Neuroscience from King’s College London, UK. She was a post-doctoral fellow working in Prof. Frank Gertler’s lab at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT for 6 years. She received a Breast Cancer Research Department of Defence Post-doctoral Fellowship and a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence from the NCI. She started her own lab at Tufts University in the department of Biomedical Engineering in 2018, where research focuses on understanding the mechanisms by which the tumor microenvironment contributes to cancer metastasis and resistance to drugs. She has received numerous awards for her research such as the DP2 New Innovator Award in 2021 and the 2020 CMBE Rising Star Award and was voted Exemplary Engineer by the graduate students in her department 3 years in a row. She is committed to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in biomedical engineering, and is the founding member of the BME DEI committee, a member of the Tufts School of Engineering DEIJT Committee, a co-organizer of the BME- UNITE seminar series.