Thomas Schultheiss, MD, PhD

About the Investigator:

Dr. Schultheiss was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of German-Jewish holocaust survivors from Nazi Germany. He received his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He then completed a medical residency in Pathology and a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. His first faculty position was at Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard Medical School. In 2007, he moved to Israel for a position at the Rappaport Medical School of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, where he is now Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology.

About the Research:

Dr. Schultheiss’ research project focuses on the problem of metastasis, which is the process where cancer cells leave the main tumor and grow as satellite tumors in distant sites. Metastasis is a multi-stage process, wherein malignant cells escape from the main tumor, become distributed to distant sites, and then take root and begin to grow in those sites.

When cells are traveling from the main tumor to other organs, they are in a form that is called “mesenchymal,” which means that they can move easily through the tissues of the body. However, in order to take root in the new location they must stop moving and clump together in order to build a new solid tumor, which is called “epithelial.” The process whereby cancer cells transition from a mobile, individualistic state to a stationary, growing state, is called “Mesenchymal-to-Epithelial Transition” (or MET).

Very little is known about MET, although it is crucial for tumor metastasis. Because MET also occurs during the development of embryos, Dr. Schultheiss and his team are using the chicken embryo as a convenient experimental system for studying MET. They aim to understand the basic biology of MET, with the hope that this knowledge will contribute to the development of novel therapies that prevent tumor metastasis.