CCE lecture: "Disappearing Neighbors: Tumor–Epithelial Interactions & Translational Opportunities in Upper GI Cancer" (Marco Gerling)

Cancers in the liver and pancreas are among the most aggressive solid tumours and are associated with some of the poorest prognoses. The two most common are pancreatic cancer and liver metastases from other primary tumours, particularly colorectal cancer.
Marco Gerling’s laboratory studies how these tumours invade healthy liver and pancreatic tissue. In this translational seminar, Dr. Gerling will introduce key principles and current insights into tumour invasion in the liver and pancreas, also highlighting research conducted at Karolinska. Together with colleagues from Karolinska’s departments of surgery and oncology, his team addresses clinical and translational questions about how these tumours invade surrounding tissues.

The talk will cover how tumour cells interact with the resident epithelial cells of the tissues they invade: hepatocytes in the liver and acinar cells in the pancreas. These epithelial cell populations respond to tumour invasion in distinct ways that depend on tumour aggressiveness and may, in turn, actively shape invasion at the tumour–normal tissue interface. Because tumour-induced changes reorganise tissue on a scale that extends beyond the microscopic level, they can, in principle, be detected directly in patients. This concept forms the basis of IMAGINE-1, a first-in-human PET study investigating the imaging of tumour-induced fibrosis in liver tumours before surgery.

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Meeting-ID: 672 8149 3129