Endosome-mitochondria interactions

We study how adaptations of the early endosomal pathway can be advantageous to cancer cells by facilitating efficient cargo delivery and modulating receptor signaling for increased metabolic and cell proliferation requirements, respectively. We propose that the significant organelle morphology variation detected in breast cancer cells may be key to cancer’s biological heterogeneity as a disease. We will tackle this challenge by studying early endosomes, a complex and dynamic organelle, and their interaction with mitochondria, in a comparative manner across 2D-culture cancer cell lines, 3D breast tumor systems and human tumor frozen tissue sections. This work will benefit from close collaboration with Dr. DiPersio (Tumor biology), Dr. Adam (kinase signaling) and Dr. Lamar (tumor biology) from AMC and Dr. Corr (3D bioprinted systems) from RPI.