Pierfrancesco Pagella

Congratulations @ivaskalab.bsky.social team for this study on the role of vibration in vocal cord cancer! Was a fun collaboration 🎤🎤

How do cells orchestrate themselves to achieve a directional movement as a group?

Hi, I’m @sayukihirano.bsky.social. In this thread, I’ll highlight key mechanisms of how cells communicate with each other to perform directional collective migration.

I’d say both would be welcome by many :)

Led by Alessia Maria Pignataro & Cornelia Schwarz, with Emilia Wiechec, Alessandro Cordiale, Shyama Sasikumar, Alexander Jenssen, Taka Ariyaberg, Lalit Khare, Ehsanul Hoque Apu, Karin Roberg, Sajjad Naeimipour, Gabriela Carballo, Marcin Szczot, Daniel Aili & Marco Rasponi - @liu.se & @polimi

Overall, this is a versatile model for interrogating solid tumor progression, therapeutic response, drug transport across extracellular and vascular barriers, and neural regulation of cancer growth and pain.

These same eECMs were used to generate injectable, hESC-derived three-dimensional human trigeminal ganglia containing diverse neuronal and glial populations,

We introduce the on-chip use of fully defined engineered extracellular matrices (eECMs) based on hyaluronic acid and PEG, crosslinked via click chemistry and independently tunable in stiffness, composition, and degradability.

Direct contact between axonal terminals and the tumor enables interrogation of how sensory innervation influences tumor growth and invasion. The dedicated neural compartment further allows imaging-based analysis of neuronal activity during tumor progression and treatment

The direct physical interface between the 3D tumor and vasculature permits analysis of collective invasion, metastatic dissemination, and systemic delivery of therapeutics, including drugs and immune-based therapies.

In brief:

- we recapitulate three fundamental and broadly conserved three-dimensional interfaces governing solid tumor behavior: the tumor–extracellular matrix, tumor–vasculature, and tumor–innervation interfaces.

Fresh pre-print: our all-human, innervated & vascularized oral cancer-on-chip, all done with fully defined extracellular matrices with controlled enrichment and degradability! 🔥

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#SpatialTranscriptomics
Visium
+ scRNAseq

Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma
vs paired Oral Leukoplakia vs normal tissues

Inhibin A+ monocyte enriched in premalignant OLK lesions

1⃣Mesenchymal CAF 2⃣APOE+NRG1+ Mφ 3⃣TNFRSF4+ Treg ⬆️with tumor progression

#CellDiscov 2023
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Dental Pulp-On-Chip” Microfluidic Devices for Emulating Human Dental Pulp Tissue Physiology and Pathology The dental pulp is a highly vascularized and innervated connective tissue located at the central part of the tooth and composed of a diverse array of cell types, including fibroblasts, multipotent mes...

In press: our brief review about the efforts to emulate the dental pulp using organ-on-a-chip approaches

”Dental Pulp-On-Chip” Microfluidic Devices for Emulating Human Dental Pulp Tissue Physiology and Pathology - Journal of Endodontics www.jendodon.com/article/S009...

”Aka: we shrank the yeast ” should have been an integral component of the title!
Super - exciting work!

A majestic tour-de-force by @szczotml.bsky.social lab at @liu.se - beautiful combination of function & transcriptional identity to understand how pain is encoded across the body 👇🏼👇🏼

…and delivers tons of exciting stuff!

Mapping genome-wide binding AND protein partners of virtually any gene regulator , simultaneously, without transgenesis? YES 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼
Look at what @annanordin.bsky.social & @claudiocantu81.bsky.social cooked!!

Please please read this.

Is it only me that finds them also incredibly awful?

The mechanical response of vinculin Vinculin buffers force via dynamic domain unfolding/refolding under physiological load and lacks a stable head-tail lock.

Vinculin is a simple adapter protein right? Wrong!

That’s been the prevailing view for the 46 years since it was discovered.

Here we provide a new paradigm and show that vinculin is a complex mechanosensor itself, containing 6 binary switch domains.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

From MRI to Ozempic: breakthroughs that show why fundamental research must be protected In these financially straitened times, funders must recognize that great discoveries often arise from work that was looking for something completely different.

Funders must recognise that great discoveries often come from studies that seeks to advance knowledge for its own sake

go.nature.com/47zrzYZ

Tomorrow Wednesday 29th at 11am, lesson #3 of @neilshubin.bsky.social guest Professor @college-de-france.fr on ‘The evolutionary origin of bones and teeth’. The second lesson is available @ www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B6y... . No registration, Free access, dentures accepted.

"Jane Goodall showed us what a life in science could look like: rigorous discovery paired with fierce advocacy for what you study. She gave the world six decades of groundbreaking research on chimpanzees and their habitats, then turned that knowledge into a global movement for conservation." (1/2)

SMAD4 induces opposite effects on metastatic growth from pancreatic tumors depending on the organ of residence - Nature Cancer Using mouse pancreatic cancer models, Tsanov et al. show that reactivation of SMAD4 at metastatic sites promotes tumor growth in the lung through RUNX1 but restrains metastatic growth through KLF4 in the liver, influenced by organ-specific epigenetic states.

SMAD4 induces opposite effects on metastatic growth from pancreatic tumors depending on the organ of residence

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Thrilled to share our new paper @cp-cell.bsky.social:
“Microglia–astrocyte crosstalk regulates synapse remodeling via Wnt signaling.”

This work demonstrates the necessity of glia–glia communication and coordination during synapse remodeling.

🔗 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Faust et al., Cell 2025

Open positions in bioengineering Learn more about open scholarship positions in bioengineering at IFM.

We are hiring! 2 years postdoctoral fellowship, to work on the generation of all-human, vascularized and innervated organ-on-chip systems & model infection & inflammation - in Sweden 🇸🇪 @liu.se

Details in the link - please help me spreading the announcement!

liu.se/en/organisat...

Thank you Gustavo!

SOX2 and NR2F1 coordinate the gene expression program of the early postnatal visual thalamus Summary: The transcriptional regulators SOX2 and NR2F1 drive the development of the visual thalamus. Mutations in these genes cause visual impairment in humans.

SOX2 and NR2F1 cooperate
to make #neurons in the #Thalamus
for visual input from the #retina

#DevBio

journals.biologists.com/bio/article/...
‪
@biologyopen.bsky.social

In collab w Sara Mercurio and Silvia Nicolis @btbsunimib.bsky.social

Driven by Linda Serra and @annanordin.bsky.social

Open positions in bioengineering Learn more about open scholarship positions in bioengineering at IFM.

We are hiring! 2 years postdoctoral fellowship, to work on the generation of all-human, vascularized and innervated organ-on-chip systems & model infection & inflammation - in Sweden 🇸🇪 @liu.se

Details in the link - please help me spreading the announcement!

liu.se/en/organisat...

An Innovative “Tooth‐On‐Chip” Microfluidic Device Emulating the Structure and Physiology of the Dental Pulp Tissue This work presents a “tooth-on-chip” device that mimics dental pulp tissue. By co-culturing key cell types, it recreates vascular networks, stem cell niches, the odontoblast/dentine interface, and tr...

Glad to share the latest effort to emulate dental tissues on-chip: an organ-on-chip design including human dental pulp stem cells & HUVECs, odontoblasts, and a dentin powder-containing compartment, all innervated by mouse trigeminal ganglia! 👇🏼

advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...