After heart disease, cancer remains the second most common cause of death in the US. Only around 5% of cancers are hereditary, and the remaining 95% are sporadic, contributed by environmental factors and lifestyle. Among these cancers, carcinomas account for over 80%, which develop in epithelial cells. Epithelial cells are attached to one another; therefore, when cancer starts in these cells, they are also attached to one another, confined to the local environment, and develop a benign tumor. At some point, when cancer progresses, the cancer cells activate a latent embryonic program known as epithelial-mesenchymal transition, gain stem cell properties, and start to behave like cells in an embryo. These cancer cells with stem cell properties are resistant to most therapies. They move around the body and develop metastasis. Advancements in sequencing, imaging, and precision oncology allow us to characterize these detrimental cells spatially and temporally at a single-cell level to find a cure for cancer. Sendurai A. Mani is a tenured Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Dean’s Endowed Chair for Translational Oncology. He is also the Associate Director for Translational Oncology at Legorreta Cancer Center and Director of the Cancer Stem Cell Center at Brown University. After completing his Ph.D. at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, Dr. Mani joined the Weinberg laboratory at the Whitehead Institute/MIT as a postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Mani and his colleagues at MIT demonstrated that the activation of latent embryonic epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) promotes metastasis. In addition, Dr. Mani was the first to show that the activation of EMT provides stem cell properties to cancer cells. This highly cited finding provided insights into the presence of plasticity within the tumor and how cancer cells survive in the circulation and develop metastasis similar to the tissue of origin at the distant site.
