Dr Roberto Buccione, Tumor Cell Invasion Unit, Department of Cell Biology and Oncology, Consorzio Mario Negri Sud, ITALY

Consorzio Mario Negri Sud located in Chieti is a private, non-profit institute that carries out basic research in cell biology related to pharmacology and biomedicine, but increasingly also epidemiological and clinical studies. The Tumor Cell Invasion Unit led by Dr Roberto Buccione has the following research interests:

• biogenesis, regulation and composition of invadopodia and other plasma membrane structures devoted to or capable of ECM degradation.
• study of the transport, sorting and targeting of membrane metalloproteases of relevance in cell invasion through the extracellular matrix

These 2 main areas have a common ground in the search for mechanisms regulating localized activation and delivery of metalloproteases, that are implicated in several of the molecular mechanisms of metastasis in cancer. The group has developed a novel technique for real-time imaging of intracellular transport intermediates in-vivo that combines GFP technology with correlative electron light microscopy. This enables a snapshot to be taken of a TI at any point in its lifecycle and is invaluable for investigating the trafficking of MMPs within the cell.

Activities in MetaBre: basic cell biology, state of the art imaging techniques, characterisation of invadopodia (and related podosomes in osteoclasts) and the molecular machinery of trafficking and secretion of MMPs.