MIPS Seminar: Cell and tissue mechanics are essential to metastasis

Professor Josef A. Kas, Head, Soft Matter Physics Division, University of Leipzig

Cells in healthy tissues are close to an unjamming transition whereas cell unjamming is an early event within the cancer metastatic cascade. Moreover, my lab’s retrospective clinical study with 1380 breast cancer patients shows that cancer cell unjamming correlates with an increased metastatic risk.  Here I will show that neither the cell shape nor the more traditional cell density serve alone as drivers of cancer cell unjamming. Rather, cancer cell unjamming can be best identified by a jamming phase diagram based upon nucleus shape as one state variable and nucleus number density as the other.