DMM Research Presentation Grants provide $1000/£500 to the first named author of a Research Article or Research Report that has been approved for publication in DMM. The grants are offered for a limited time to contribute towards travel and other expenses incurred by the author in presenting the work from their DMM publication at a major meeting. Recent recipients of this grant include Cristina Santoriello and Mikala Egeblad.
Dr Egeblad recently presented her work, which uses spinning disk confocal microscopy to understand the dynamics of host cells in tumors using mouse cancer models. At the American Association for Cancer Research’s (AACR) Special Conference on Mouse Models of Cancer, she showed how this new technology reveals differences in cell behavior in different parts of an in vivo tumor. This technology allows for a real-time look into the tumor microenvironment and is now being extended to understand the response of cancer and host cells to drug treatment.
Dr Santoriello uses zebrafish to model Costello syndrome, a rare genetic disease that results from activating mutations in the H-RAS gene. She will use the grant award to present her work at the 16th International Society of Developmental Biologists Congress in September. She found that transgenic fish that express oncogenic H-RAS throughout the germline develop a complex phenotype resembling that of Costello syndrome. Along with her colleagues, she demonstrated that some of these phenotypes are the result of oncogene-induced senescence, which affects mature proliferating cells in the heart and brain –two of the most affected organs in Costello patients. This suggests that an oncogene-induced response triggers cellular senescence during development, which might contribute to brain and cardiac defects in Costello patients.
