Ana receives a CaixaResearch Health Grant
Ana is one of the 6 winners in the area of Oncology, and her project will advance our understanding of how organ-specific microenvironments influence the formation of breast cancer metastases.
The competitive CaixaResearch Health call by "la Caixa" Foundation supports promising projects of scientific excellence with potential value and social impact, whether in basic, clinical or translational research. Funded thematic areas span Neuroscience, Oncology, Cardiovascular and associated metabolic disease, Infectious diseases and Enabling technologies focused on the four previous thematic areas. Our awarded project, DynaMet, has received 997,610 €, in a joint collaboration between "la Caixa" Foundation and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) in Portugal.
DynaMet will map the landscape of the microenvironments that support or oppose metastasis in the two most common and deadliest sites of breast cancer metastasis (liver and bone), in both mouse models and humans. Born from a unique synergy of expertise and dedication between the laboratories led by Ana Luísa Correia at Champalimaud Foundation and Neta Erez at Tel Aviv University, DynaMet will identify where and when the microenvironment within each organ changes to facilitate metastatic outgrowth. By revealing a novel role for anatomical organization in controlling dormancy and the emergence of metastases, DynaMet will transform our understanding of the rate-limiting step of metastasis and how we approach it therapeutically.
