Datos del evento
Conferenciante: Gabriel Piedrafita Fernández (BQ). Profesor Contratado Doctor. Facultad de Ciencias Químicas, UCM.
Moderador: Antonio Sánchez Torralba. Facultad de Ciencias Químicas, UCM.
Understanding the proliferative organization and self-renewal potential of healthy somatic tissues is paramount to address mutant clone expansion during cancer initiation. Yet, cell dynamics in normal and precancerous epithelia have remained largely unknown until recent years. By combining quantitative lineage tracing in transgenic mouse models and mathematical modeling we can now achieve great progress in cell kinetic characterizations in vivo. In this talk I will describe our discoveries in the context of the fast-renewing epithelia of the esophagus and the skin epidermis, where we have shown that cell renewal is maintained by a single population of progenitor cells committing to stochastic fates. This paradigm has allowed us to infer important constraints on mutant cell behavior that might explain the surprising reluctance of these tissues to form tumors in mouse upon mutagen treatment. Then, I will move to explain our current efforts and challenges to address cellular dynamics in slow-renewing epithelia, and more in particular the bladder urothelium, a paradoxical case of a tissue with one of the lowest proliferation rates but source of a highly prevalent type of cancer that typically occurs with multifocality.