Metastasis is responsible for nine out of ten cancer deaths. This fact, which frightens many of us, is the driving force behind researchers who want to study this phenomenon and find solutions.
In the fifth episode of ‘La mare de la ciència‘, the scientific dissemination podcast in Catalan of the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), we will discover how metastasis originates and what treatments are investigated to deal with it. Toni Celià Terrassa, head of the group studying cancer stem cells and the dynamics of metastasis at the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), will be the interviewee of this episode.
“Metastasis is the spread of the tumor to other organs,” he explains. And luckily it’s a difficult process. The majority of cancer cells that come out of a tumor die, adds the researcher, and only those with the greatest adaptability will be able to metastasize to other organs.
However, not all metastases behave in the same way. In the case of breast cancer, cells respond poorly to immunotherapy treatments, and Toni’s group is trying to refine treatments to make the immune system more accurate by locating and recognizing tumor cells.
Being a young group leader, Toni admits that thinking about experiments and creating synergies between team members is one of his favority tasks. But he knows that in science things are not easy. To succeed “you need to be very lucky. But to have luck, you have to persevere and look for it”.
Don’t miss his testimony!
