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| <p>Cell Motility and Wound Healing</p> | |
| <p><strong><em>MICHAEL R. BUBB, M.D.</em></strong><em> Research Service North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System</em></p> | |
| <p><em>Associate Professor,</em></p> | |
| <p><em>Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, University of Florida</em></p> | |
| <p>The crawling behavior of cells is a critical feature of living organisms. In humans, cell motility is required for normal wound healing, for neurological development and for the ability to fight infection. Cell motility also has an important role in many human diseases. One of the most prominent of these is cancer, where motility is a prerequisite for malignant cancer cells if they are to crawl into a vascular or lymphatic space, from which they can then metastasize to distant locations.</p> | |
| <p>Our laboratory studies the cellular machinery responsible for cell movement. We have identified and characterized several proteins that function to regulate cell motility. Not surprisingly, many of these same proteins function as tumor suppressors and promoters in humans. Our laboratory also is interested in pharmacologic agents that modulate cell motility. Through a network of collaborative effort, our laboratory has developed a large repository of marine natural products that bind to and affect proteins involved in cellular motility. We have characterized the properties of many of these agents and have identified some that mimic the behavior of the tumor suppressor proteins that regulate cell motility. Although development of these agents is still at an early stage, they have tremendous potential for the treatment of cancer. The National Cancer Institute, for example, has identified one of our drugs in a screen of potential chemotherapeutic agents to be the most potent agent yet available for the control of prostate cancer cells growing in culture.</p> | |
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