Caroline Hill “How the zebrafish makes its guts and other...

The lecture will highlight some of our recent work on signalling by the TGF-β family members in health and disease and will be in three parts. I will start with our work showing how the cell fate decision between endoderm (which develops into the gastrointestinal tract) and mesoderm (which develops into bone, muscle, blood etc) is achieved in vertebrate embryos, using zebrafish as a model ... system. In the second part,
I will discuss some unpublished work on the role of activin signalling in breast and pancreatic cancer. This work grew out of insights that we obtained from our developmental work. Using a neutralizing anti-Activin A antibody in mouse models of cancer, we have been able to show that the effect of inhibiting Activin in the tumours is dependent on the SMAD4 status of the cancer cells. The relevance of this for human cancer will be discussed. I will end with some structural insights into how TGF-β is recruited to its receptors for signalling.

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