LAUSR

Cancers hijack mechanisms of neural plasticity to promote malignant disease progression Cancer has been called the “emperor of all maladies” (1). An estimated 40% of us will be diagnosed with it at some point in our lives (2). We have all witnessed the irreverent brutality of this disease that seems to know no bounds. Like weeds in a garden, cancers emerge suddenly and proliferate aggressively by co-opting vital systems necessary for survival. Although current treatment approaches have targeted the vascular and immune systems as well as cell-intrinsic growth mechanisms, the nervous system's role in cancer growth has been largely underrecognized. My research aims to combine principles of neuroscience and cancer biology to harness microenvironmental dependencies of tumors and disable hijacked mechanisms of neural plasticity.