Snail in metastatic ovarian cancer: The ability of
carcinoma cells to undergo epithelial-mesenchymal transition, or EMT, affords
them with enhanced capacity to invade, migrate and metastasize. We identified
that ovarian cancer cells induce an EMT phenotype during spheroid formation,
and that the transcription factor Snail is the most robustly upregulated of the
EMT master regulators. Our most recent gene knockdown and ectopic
overexpression studies have demonstrated that Snail can control the invasive
nature of ovarian cancer spheroids and promote metastasis. Current work is
underway to determine whether Snail is required (i.e. via CRISPR-mediated SNAI1
deletion) for ovarian cancer cell dissemination in pre-clinical orthotopic metastasis models.