Professor and Co-Chair, Anatomy and Structural Biology
Co-Director, Gruss Lipper Biophotonics Center
Director, Program in Motility and Invasion
Albert Einstein College Of Medicine Of Yeshiva University
Forchheimer 641
Jack and Pearl Resnick Campus
1300 Morris Park Avenue
Bronx, NY 10461
USA

Research Interests

The recent convergence of technologies for expression profiling and multiphoton-based intravital imaging has revealed a gene expression profile that is involved in the survival, chemotaxis and invasion of tumor cells inside living tumors. These genes fall into well defined pathways and are coordinately regulated in invasive tumor cells. This pattern is called the Invasion Signature. The Invasion Signature indicates that invasive tumor cells are a population that is neither proliferating nor apoptotic but highly chemotactic to macrophage-secreted EGF. The Invasion Signature provides several new biomarkers for predicting prognosis which are in clinical trials. The invasive tumor cells also make more numerous invadopods in vivo. It appears that the Invasion Signature contains the wiring diagrams for the signaling and assembly pathways of invadopods. Confirming this hypothesis and understanding how these pathways regulate invadopod function is a major focus of my laboratory.