Cells are machines made to divide. Any insult that stops them from dividing creates a situation of stress that can be solved in different ways: either cell die, or senesce, or manage to divide regardless of the insult. In our lab, we study how cells cope with such prolonged arrest. Our interest is driven by sheer curiosity, but also by the fact that many drugs used to cure cancer act by arresting the cell cycle. It is then important to understand how to channel cells’ fate toward arrest and death rather than proliferation. We address this problem with a combination of experiments and mathematical models, done both in yeast (a model system) and mammalian cells.
Recently, we identified pathways cells use to become resistant to drugs impairing microtubules. Our activities are integrated with a twin lab in IFOM (Milan), the Institute of molecular oncology of the italian association for cancer research (AIRC). Currently, the lab based in Budapest is specialized in performing mathematical models and analysing data.
