Sherwood Lab reveals important feature of invading cells

Sherwood Lab reveals important feature of invading cells

Dave Sherwood's lab has a new paper in Developmental Cell (October 26, 2015), "Invasive Cell Fate Requires G1 Cell-Cycle Arrest and Histone Deacetylase-Mediated Changes in Gene Expression." The researchers found that invasive cells have to be in a non-dividing state to invade into tissues.  This is important medically because chemotherapy treatments predominantly target actively dividing cells.   This approach could unwittingly select for more aggressive/invasive cancers, as the invading cancer cells would elude chemotherapy treatment and then at a later time resume division and repopulate tumors.  

Congratulations, Sherwood Lab, on adding another piece to the puzzle!