the shepherd lab

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.