Robert Weinberg

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Macrophages hold tremendous promise as effectors of cancer immunotherapy, but the best strategies to provoke these cells to attack tumors remain unknown. Here, we evaluated the therapeutic potential of targeting two distinct macrophage immune checkpoints: CD47 and CD24. We found that antibodies targeting these antigens could elicit maximal levels o...

While major advancements have been made in treatment of primary tumors in estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer, reducing mortality from metastatic breast cancer (mBC) in treated patients who develop endocrine resistance to first line therapies remains an unmet clinical need. Wild-type ER activity or availability of its cognate ligand 17-b...

Macrophages hold tremendous promise as effectors of cancer immunotherapy, but the best strategies to provoke these cells to attack tumors remain unknown. Here, we evaluated the therapeutic potential of targeting two distinct macrophage immune checkpoints: CD47 and CD24. We found that antibodies targeting these antigens could elicit maximal levels o...

Cancer metastasis is a biologically complex process that remains a major challenge in the oncology clinic, accounting for nearly all of the mortality associated with malignant neoplasms. To establish metastatic growths, carcinoma cells must disseminate from the primary tumour, survive in unfamiliar tissue microenvironments, re-activate programs of...

Cancer cell fate has been widely ascribed to mutational changes within protein-coding genes associated with tumor suppressors and oncogenes. In contrast, the mechanisms through which the biophysical properties of membrane lipids influence cancer cell survival, dedifferentiation and metastasis have received little scrutiny. Here, we report that canc...

Clinical and molecular evidence indicates that high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) primarily originates from the fallopian tube, not the ovarian surface. However, the reasons for this preference remain unclear. Our study highlights significant differences between fallopian tube epithelial (FTE) and ovarian surface epithelial (OSE) cells, provi...

Ferroptosis is a form of regulated cell death with roles in degenerative diseases and cancer. Excessive iron-catalyzed peroxidation of membrane phospholipids, especially those containing the polyunsaturated fatty acid arachidonic acid (AA), is central in driving ferroptosis. Here, we reveal that an understudied Golgi-resident scaffold protein, MMD,...

Detecting early cancer through liquid biopsy is challenging due to the lack of specific biomarkers for early lesions and potentially low levels of these markers. The current study systematically develops an extracellular‐vesicle (EV)‐based test for early detection, specifically focusing on high‐grade serous ovarian carcinoma (HGSOC). The marker sel...

Ovarian cancer is a heterogeneous group of tumors in both cell type and natural history. While outcomes are generally favorable when detected early, the most common subtype, high-grade serous carcinoma (HGSOC), typically presents at an advanced stage and portends less favorable prognoses. Its aggressive nature has thwarted early detection efforts t...

Ovarian cancer is especially deadly, challenging to treat, and has proven refractory to known immunotherapies. Cytokine therapy is an attractive strategy to drive a proinflammatory immune response in immunologically cold tumors such as many high grade ovarian cancers; however, this strategy has been limited in the past due to severe toxicity. We pr...

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) may serve as the cellular seeds of tumor recurrence and metastasis, and they can be generated via epithelial-mesenchymal transitions (EMTs). Isolating pure populations of CSCs is difficult because EMT programs generate multiple alternative cell states, and phenotypic plasticity permits frequent interconversions between thes...

Ferroptosis is a form of regulated cell death with roles in degenerative diseases and cancer. Ferroptosis is driven by excessive iron-dependent peroxidation of membrane phospholipids, especially those containing the polyunsaturated fatty acid arachidonic acid. Here, we reveal that an understudied Golgi membrane scaffold protein, MMD, promotes susce...

Epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) programs operate within carcinoma cells, where they generate phenotypes associated with malignant progression. In their various manifestations, EMT programs enable epithelial cells to enter into a series of intermediate states arrayed along the E–M phenotypic spectrum. At present, we lack a coherent understan...

The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and primary ciliogenesis induce stem cell properties in basal mammary stem cells (MaSCs) to promote mammogenesis, but the underlying mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Here, we show that EMT transcription factors promote ciliogenesis upon entry into intermediate EMT states by activating ciliogenes...

Epithelial stem cells serve critical physiological functions in the generation, maintenance and repair of diverse tissues through their ability to self-renew and spawn more specialized, differentiated cell types. In an analogous fashion, cancer stem cells have been proposed to fuel the growth, progression and recurrence of many carcinomas. Activati...

The epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which conveys epithelial (E) carcinoma cells to quasi-mesenchymal (qM) states, enables these cells to gain tumor-initiating stem like abilities, metastasize and acquire resistance to several drug and chemotherapeutic regimens. In addition to these aforementioned features, we have recently demonstrated...

The Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) and primary ciliogenesis induce stem cell properties in basal Mammary Stem Cells (MaSCs) to promote mammogenesis, but the underlying mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Here, we show that EMT transcription factors promote ciliogenesis at intermediate EMT transition states by activating ciliogenesis...

The epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, which conveys epithelial (E) carcinoma cells to quasi-mesenchymal (qM) states, enables them to metastasize and acquire resistance to certain treatments. Murine tumors composed of qM mammary carcinoma cells assemble an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME) and develop resistance to anti-CTLA4 immune...

The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a key cell-biological program enabling carcinoma cell phenotypic plasticity. Accumulating evidence suggests EMT programs do not operate as a stereotypical program that functions as a binary switch, shifting cells from an epithelial (E) to a mesenchymal (M) state. Instead, EMT programs generate cells th...

The paucity of genetically informed, immunocompetent tumor models impedes evaluation of conventional, targeted, and immune therapies. By engineering mouse fallopian tube epithelial organoids using lentiviral gene transduction and/or CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis, we generated multiple high-grade serous tubo-ovarian cancer (HGSC) models exhibiting mutatio...

Despite advances in immuno-oncology, the relationship between tumor genotypes and response to immunotherapy remains poorly understood, particularly in high-grade serous tubo-ovarian carcinomas (HGSC). We developed a series of mouse models that carry genotypes of human HGSCs and grow in syngeneic immunocompetent hosts to address this gap. We transfo...

Background Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) has generated some dramatic responses in certain types of human tumors, most notably, melanomas. However, the response of breast tumors has been largely limited. We have previously demonstrated that the residence of breast cancer cells in the epithelial or mesenchymal phenotypic states can itself be used...

Ferroptosis—an iron-dependent, non-apoptotic cell death process—is involved in various degenerative diseases and represents a targetable susceptibility in certain cancers¹. The ferroptosis-susceptible cell state can either pre-exist in cells that arise from certain lineages or be acquired during cell-state transitions2–5. However, precisely how sus...

75% of women suffering from ovarian cancer are diagnosed at late stage of the disease often associated with cancer cell infiltration into the peritoneal cavity. Standard therapy is tumor resection and subsequent platin-based chemotherapy. Relapse is frequently observed caused by persisting cancer cells. Persister cells comprise a therapy-tolerant s...

p>Immunotherapy in ovarian cancer has been disappointing, with only ~10% of patients responding to checkpoint blockade. The determinants of this low response rate remain poorly understood and there is a pressing need for immune-competent preclinical models to elucidate the biology of immune evasion in ovarian cancer. One critical area of interest i...

High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is the most common and deadly subtype of ovarian epithelial cancer and is known for its aggressiveness, high recurrence rate, metastasis to other sites, development of resistance to conventional chemotherapy, and general lack of response to immune checkpoint inhibitors. The absence of genomically relevant, i...

Epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) encompasses dynamic changes in cellular organization from epithelial to mesenchymal phenotypes, which leads to functional changes in cell migration and invasion. EMT occurs in a diverse range of physiological and pathological conditions and is driven by a conserved set of inducing signals, transcriptional reg...

The paucity of genetically informed, immune-competent tumor models impedes evaluation of conventional, targeted, and immune therapies. By engineering mouse fallopian tube (FT) organoids using lentiviral gene transduction and/or CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis, we generated multiple high grade serous ovarian carcinoma (HGSOC) models exhibiting mutational co...

Tissue regeneration relies on adult stem cells (SCs) that possess the ability to self-renew and produce differentiating progeny. In an analogous manner, the development of certain cancers depends on a subset of tumor cells, called cancer stem cells (CSCs), with SC-like properties. In addition to being responsible for tumorigenesis, CSCs exhibit ele...

High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is the most common, deadly subtype of ovarian epithelial cancer. HGSOC typically presents at an advanced stage, with widespread peritoneal metastasis. Surgical debulking and platinum/taxane-based chemotherapy can result in complete responses, but disease almost always recurs, eventually in drug-resistant for...

The epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a cell-biologic program that confers mesenchymal traits on carcinoma cells and drives their metastatic dissemination. We recently demonstrated that epithelial and mesenchymal carcinomas recruit distinct immune cells to their tumor microenvironments (TME) and differ in their susceptibility to checkpo...

Immunotherapy in ovarian cancer has been disappointing, with only ~10% of patients responding to checkpoint blockade. The determinants of this low response rate remain poorly understood, and there is a pressing need for immune-competent preclinical models to elucidate the biology of immune evasion in ovarian cancer. One critical area of interest is...

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are key drivers of cancer metastasis, drug resistance, and disease recurrence. While the transcriptional regulatory circuitry that underlies the generation and propagation of the breast CSC state is not completely understood, defining the core regulators of the CSC state has the potential to reveal how these cells arise and...

High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is the most common and deadly subtype of ovarian epithelial cancer. HGSOC typically presents at an advanced stage, with widespread peritoneal metastasis. Although surgical debulking and platinum/taxane-based chemotherapy can result in complete responses, disease almost always recurs, eventually in drug-resis...

High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is the most frequent and most aggressive histologic subtype of ovarian cancer. The cornerstone of the existing treatment of HGSOC is DNA-damaging chemotherapy; however, practically all patients eventually develop a progressive disease and the 5-year survival is only 40%. Immunotherapy would seem to be an att...

Systemic dissemination of tumor cells often begins long before the development of overt metastases, revealing the inefficient nature of the metastatic process. Thus, already at the time of initial clinical presentation, many patients with cancer harbor a myriad disseminated tumor cells (DTC) throughout the body, most of which are found as mitotical...

Significance Immunotherapy, especially blockade of the PD-1/PD-L1 and CTLA-4 axes, has resulted in durable responses in a range of cancers. However, responses remain heterogeneous among patients. Treatment outcome results from changes in the tumor microenvironment imposed by such blockade. Here, we use immuno-PET and single-cell RNA sequencing to i...

Carcinoma cells residing in an intermediate phenotypic state along the epithelial–mesenchymal (E–M) spectrum are associated with malignant phenotypes, such as invasiveness, tumor-initiating ability, and metastatic dissemination. Using the recently described CD104⁺/CD44hi antigen marker combination, we isolated highly tumorigenic breast cancer cells...

Epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a cellular programme that is known to be crucial for embryogenesis, wound healing and malignant progression. During EMT, cell–cell and cell–extracellular matrix interactions are remodelled, which leads to the detachment of epithelial cells from each other and the underlying basement membrane, and a new tra...

Lack of insight into mechanisms governing breast cancer metastasis has precluded the development of curative therapies. Metastasis-initiating cancer cells (MICs) are uniquely equipped to establish metastases, causing recurrence and therapeutic resistance. Using various metastasis models, we discovered that certain primary tumours elicit a systemic...

Alternative splicing of mRNA precursors represents a key gene expression regulatory step and permits the generation of distinct protein products with diverse functions. In a genome-scale expression screen for inducers of the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), we found a striking enrichment of RNA-binding proteins. We validated that QKI and...

QKI rMATS splicing output.

RBFOX1 rMATS splicing output.

QKI and RBFOX1 overlapping events.

QKI and RBFOX1 CLIP peaks.

Antibodies, primer and oligo sequence This file contains information for antibodies, and the sequence for primers and oligonucleotides that were used in this study.

The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) endows carcinoma cells with traits needed to complete many of the steps leading to metastasis formation, but its contributions specifically to the late step of extravasation remain understudied. We find that breast cancer cells that have undergone an EMT extravasate more efficiently from blood vessels bot...

The clinical successes in immunotherapy have been both astounding and at the same time unsatisfactory. Countless patients with varied tumor types have seen pronounced clinical response with immunotherapeutic intervention; however, many more patients have experienced minimal or no clinical benefit when provided the same treatment. As technology has...

Patients undergoing surgical resection of primary breast tumors confront a risk for metastatic recurrence that peaks sharply 12 to 18 months after surgery. The cause of early metastatic relapse in breast cancer has long been debated, with many ascribing these relapses to the natural progression of the disease. Others have proposed that some aspect...

Similar to embryonic development, changes in cell phenotypes defined as an epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) have been shown to play a role in the tumorigenic process. Although the first description of EMT in cancer was in cell cultures, evidence for its role in vivo is now widely reported but also actively debated. Moreover, current resea...

Significance Breast cancer is one the most common cancers and causes of cancer-related death worldwide. Tumor recurrence following therapy is attributed to a subset of tumor-initiating cells (TICs) with stem cell (SC) properties. Similar to normal adult SCs that drive tissue regeneration, TICs regenerate tumors after treatment and thereby enable di...

The cell-biological program termed epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) plays a key role in adenocarcinoma progression, invasion, and metastasis. An EMT operating within carcinoma cells can be activated by a variety of paracrine signals arising in the tumor microenvironment. These EMT-inducing signals trigger profound transcription changes throu...

Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a cellular program that operates in the context of embryogenesis, wound healing and carcinoma pathogenesis to drive epithelial cells towards a mesenchymal state. During carcinoma progression, EMT enables the cells forming these tumours to acquire the traits of highly malignant cells, notably motility, i...

Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is an essential developmental program through which epithelial cells lose their polarity and junctions with neighboring cells and acquire migratory and invasive properties. Cancer cells hijack at least a portion of the EMT program to increase their invasive properties, acquire resistance to senescence, and me...

Immunotherapy using checkpoint-blocking antibodies against targets such as CTLA-4 and PD-1 can cure melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer in a subset of patients. The presence of CD8 T cells in the tumor correlates with improved survival. We show that immuno-positron emission tomography (immuno-PET) can visualize tumors by detecting infiltrating...

The Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a cell-biological program that confers mesenchymal traits on carcinoma cells and drives their metastatic dissemination. It is, unclear, however, whether activation of EMT in carcinoma cells can change their susceptibility to immune attack. We demonstrate here that mammary tumor cells arising from mo...

The success of anticancer therapy is usually limited by the development of drug resistance. Such acquired resistance is driven, in part, by intratumoural heterogeneity - that is, the phenotypic diversity of cancer cells co-inhabiting a single tumour mass. The introduction of the cancer stem cell (CSC) concept, which posits the presence of minor sub...

Post-mitotic, differentiated cells exhibit a variety of characteristics that contrast with those of actively growing neoplastic cells, such as the expression of cell-cycle inhibitors and differentiation factors. We hypothesized that the gene expression profiles of these differentiated cells could reveal the identities of genes that may function as...

Significance It is widely appreciated that carcinoma cells exhibiting certain mesenchymal traits are enriched for cancer stem cells (CSCs) and can give rise to tumors with aggressive features. Whereas it has been proposed that mesenchymal carcinoma cell populations are internally heterogeneous, the field has made little progress in resolving the sp...

Overview An enigma for cancer medicine lies in its complexity and variability, at all levels of consideration. The hallmarks of cancer constitute an organizing principle that provides a conceptual basis for distilling the complexity of this disease in order to better understand it in its diverse presentations. This conceptualization involves eight...

Metastases account for the great majority of cancer-associated deaths, yet this complex process remains the least understood aspect of cancer biology. As the body of research concerning metastasis continues to grow at a rapid rate, the biological programs that underlie the dissemination and metastatic outgrowth of cancer cells are beginning to come...

Although important strides have been made in targeted therapy for certain leukemias and subtypes of breast cancer, the standard of care for most carcinomas still involves chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, or a combination of these. Two processes serve as obstacles to the successful treatment of carcinomas. First, a majority of deaths from these...

Carcinoma cells that are induced to suppress their epithelial features and upregulate mesenchymal gene expression programs acquire traits that promote an invasive and metastatic phenotype. This is achieved through the expression of a program termed the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT)-a fundamental cell-biological process that plays key r...

The emergence of metastatic disease in cancer patients many years or decades after initial successful treatment of primary tumors is well documented but poorly understood at the molecular level. Recent studies have begun exploring the cell-intrinsic programs causing disseminated tumor cells to enter latency and the cellular signals in the surroundi...

s: AACR Special Conference: The Function of Tumor Microenvironment in Cancer Progression; January 7-10, 2016; San Diego, CA The ability of carcinoma cells to acquire cell-biological phenotypes associated with advanced malignancies is increasingly associated with activation of the EMT (epithelial-mesenchymal transition) program. Among the acquired...

The causes for breast cancer recurrence in the form of metastatic disease and the reasons why less than 1% of disseminated tumor cells form metastases are unknown. A number of studies have demonstrated that the aggressive cancer cell population capable of driving metastasis feature properties of the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and tumor...

Unlabelled: Immune cells promote the initial metastatic dissemination of carcinoma cells from primary tumors. In contrast to their well-studied functions in the initial stages of metastasis, the specific roles of immunocytes in facilitating progression through the critical later steps of the invasion-metastasis cascade remain poorly understood. He...

Have cancer stem cells MET their match? Solid tumors have been hypothesized to contain a subset of highly aggressive cells that fuel tumor growth and metastasis. The search is on for drugs that selectively kill or diminish the malignant properties of these tumor-initiating cells (TICs; previously called “cancer stem cells”). Pattabiraman et al. hyp...

s: CRI-CIMT-EATI-AACR Inaugural International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference: Translating Science into Survival; September 16-19, 2015; New York, NY The cell-biological program termed the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) confers on cancer cells mesenchymal traits and an ability to enter the cancer stem cell (CSC) state. In addition, EMT up...

A major challenge for cancer medicine involves the remarkable variability of the disease, at all levels. The hallmarks of cancer constitute an organizing principle that may provide a rational basis for distilling this complexity so as to better understand mechanisms of the disease in its diverse manifestations. The conceptualization involves eight...

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) have emerged in recent years as important targets for cancer therapy owing to their elevated resistance to conventional chemotherapy as well as to tumor-initiating ability that enables them to seed new tumors and thereby drive clinical relapse. The epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a cell-biological program that...

The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) program has emerged as a central driver of tumor malignancy. Moreover, the recently uncovered link between passage through an EMT and acquisition of stem-like properties indicates that activation of the EMT programs serves as a major mechanism for generating cancer stem cells (CSCs); that is, a subpopulat...

Tumour-initiating cells (TICs) are responsible for metastatic dissemination and clinical relapse in a variety of cancers. Analogies between TICs and normal tissue stem cells have led to the proposal that activation of the normal stem-cell program within a tissue serves as the major mechanism for generating TICs. Supporting this notion, we and other...

By dividing asymmetrically, stem cells can generate two daughter cells with distinct fates. However, evidence is limited in mammalian systems for the selective apportioning of subcellular contents between daughters. We followed the fates of old and young organelles during the division of human mammary stemlike cells and found that such cells apport...

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Identifying the cancer cells-of-origin is of great interest, as it holds the potential to elucidate biologic mechanisms inherent in the normal cell state that have been co-opted to drive the oncogenic cell state. An emerging concept, proposed here, states that cancer stem cells, key players in cancer initiation and metastasis, arise when transit-am...

Reprogramming of fibroblasts to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) entails a mesenchymal to epithelial transition (MET). While attempting to dissect the mechanism of MET during reprogramming, we observed that knockdown (KD) of the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) factor SNAI1 (SNAIL) paradoxically reduced, while overexpression enhance...

The cell-biological program termed the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) confers on cancer cells mesenchymal traits and an ability to enter the cancer stem cell (CSC) state. However, the interactions between CSCs and their surrounding microenvironment are poorly understood. Here we show that tumour-associated monocytes and macrophages (TAMs)...

It is increasingly appreciated that oncogenic transformation alters cellular metabolism to facilitate cell proliferation, but less is known about the metabolic changes that promote cancer cell aggressiveness. Here, we analyzed metabolic gene expression in cancer cell lines and found that a set of high-grade carcinoma lines expressing mesenchymal ma...

Tumor-associated angiogenesis is postulated to be regulated by the balance between pro- and anti-angiogenic factors. We demonstrate here that the critical step in establishing the angiogenic capability of human tumor cells is the repression of a key secreted anti-angiogenic factor, thrombospondin-1 (Tsp-1). This repression is essential for tumor fo...

Recent pre-clinical and clinical research has provided evidence that cancer progression is driven not only by a tumour's underlying genetic alterations and paracrine interactions within the tumour microenvironment, but also by complex systemic processes. We review these emerging paradigms of cancer pathophysiology and discuss how a clearer understa...

Since their identification in 1994, cancer stem cells (CSCs) have been objects of intensive study. Their properties and mechanisms of formation have become a major focus of current cancer research, in part because of their enhanced ability to initiate and drive tumour growth and their intrinsic resistance to conventional therapeutics. The discovery...

The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), a pleiotropic cellular program, has been associated with the acquisition of metastatic ability, self-renewal traits and resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs in breast cancer and other carcinomas. During normal development and tumor progression, this change in cell phenotype is induced by contextual signa...