Dr Gabri van der Pluijm, Department of Endocrinology, University of Leiden Medical Centre, NETHERLANDS

LUMC combines the Leiden University Hospital and Faculty of Medicine of Leiden University. It is one of the leading medical schools in the Netherlands and provides routine and high-level clinical care, as well as specialist medical training and healthcare-related research. The Department of Endocrinology has very active research interests in osteoporosis, rare bone diseases and bone metastatic disease.

Current research activities include angiogenesis and cellular, humoral and molecular mechanisms of bone metastases from breast and prostate cancer. The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and osteomimicry of cancer cells is a major theme, and inhibitors of EMT as well as inducers of MET are being investigated. The group also tests experimental therapeutics for the prevention and treatment of bone metastases, including bisphosphonates.

LUMC has developed a novel technique of bioluminescent reporter imaging of luciferase-labelled metastatic cells. This has been demonstrated to be useful in detecting bone micrometastases at the early stages of the disease, before tumour induced osteolysis commences. This model will be very valuable for in vivo tests of modulators of metastatic processes in the proposed studies. LUMC is also developing expertise in functional genomics of bone metastases formation, and will be using overexpression and gene silencing in the project.

Activities in MetaBre: luminescent imaging of metastases, in vitro and in vivo models for bone metastases, gene function studies