Monitoring Transient Tumour-Immune Cell Interactions Using Synnotch

Although metastatic cancer is one of the world’s leading death causes, current knowledge of mechanisms underlying metastasis formation is limited due to the absence of powerful molecular monitoring tools. It is known that macrophages can be reprogrammed by cancer cells to function as anti-inflammatory and pro-tumorigenic cells, giving rise to the multiple subsets of tumour-associated macrophages. One of such subsets is metastasis-associated macrophages (MAMs), which are involved in the tumour establishment at metastatic sites, and, therefore, could act as potential therapeutic targets in metastasis prevention. In this project, we aim at applying a recently developed synthetic Notch receptor (synNotch) to target various macrophage biomarkers to study MAM – cancer cell interactions in vivo. This could potentially provide insights into metastasis progression and prevention mechanisms.