On Wednesday, March 26, at 13.00 at the ZOOM link https://upatras-gr.zoom.us/j/92961310843?pwd=NB0M9Wh6T1QaY7i0G6RDFtKfkTNga0.1,

an Invited talk by Dr. K. Kolliopoulos will take place.

Invited speaker: Dr. Konstantinos Kolliopoulos, post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Cellular Metabolism and Metabolic Regulation, VIB/KU Leuven, Belgium

Title: Unraveling the role of methionine restriction in breast cancer metastasis

Abstract: Metastasis is the leading cause of mortality among cancer patients. Unfortunately, metastatic breast cancer remains incurable. Metastasis formation includes cancer cell dissemination from the primary tumor, survival in circulation and seeding at distant organs. Cancer cells rely heavily on available nutrients to achieve this process. Thus, dietary interventions are considered as potent cancer therapy strategies and may be appealing to patients, who feel they can contribute to their own treatment. For example, restriction of the non-essential-amino-acids serine and glycine is currently tested in patients with advanced rectal and pancreatic cancer. In contrast, there is a gap of knowledge on the impact of restriction of essential-amino-acids (EAAs) on metastatic cancers, which has the advantage that cancer cells are unable to synthesize them. One of these EAA is methionine, and cancer cells show higher uptake rates than adjacent tissues, promoting tumor growth and chemoresistance. Moreover, methionine restriction restrains obesity and ageing, two major risk factors for metastatic breast cancer. However, how methionine restriction affects breast cancer metastasis remains elusive. In this seminar, I will discuss how dietary methionine restriction affects breast cancer metastasis using cell lines and mouse models and unravel the mechanisms for methionine-dependent metastatic seeding.

For details, see the attached file.