Research Projects

Breast cancer accounts for second highest incidence rate among all the cancers and regarded as most significant malignant disease in women. Approximately, 30% of all the detected breast cancer cases eventually progress in to the distant organ metastasis and contribute to its high mortality rate. Therefore, in order to make surgical interventions more viable, impairing the metastatic cascade to delay or prevent the spread of malignant disease offers a feasible and exciting treatment option. It’s well-established fact that hypoxia acts as a key inducer of the metastasis as well as modulator of extracellular matrix in solid tumors to facilitate cell migration and initiation of new metastatic sites. Importantly, it’s also known that hypoxic tumor microenvironment induces enhanced shedding of extracellular vesicles (EVs) which act as signalosome for relaying the information to surrounding stromal cells. Therefore, we hypothesize that global, qualitative as well as quantitative LC-MS/MS based comprehensive proteomic/phospho-proteomic analysis of EVs secreted in response to the hypoxia in cancer cell line model and their validation in in-vitro and in-vivo model would reveal altered extracellular signalling paradigm which facilitates tumour progression and metastasis. To the best of our knowledge, this will be the first attempt to profile and quantitate hypoxia inducible breast cancer EV global proteome alterations by high end LC-MS/MS instrumentation. We expect its systematic investigation in breast cancer metastasis model will help us to identify the putative candidate target proteins for further chemotherapeutic as well diagnostic applications.