Kursinformation

Welcome on to the laboratory of General Pathology  KIRO website.

We are finally fully equipped in our new teaching laboratories at via Taramelli to give you a hands-on laboratory experience. With the General Pathology laboratory we want to show you a cell-based assay that was responsible for the discovery of an important growth factor present in cell medium of fibroblasts in the 1980s: Scatter Factor. This important protein in our body turned out to be identical to one discovered and studied by a Japanese team called Hepatocyte Growth Factor, around the same time. This explains the name, HGF/SF.

The protein had a remarkable effect on specific epithelial cells called Madine-Darby Canine Kidney (MDCK) cells. The cells grow in tightly packed colonies of cells strongly adherent to each other and to the flask or dish they are cultured in. Upon exposure to HGF/SF, these cells show a dramatic phenotypic change and start to detach from other cells, become more elongated, motile, and "scatter". This process is called Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition  (EMT) and is very important during embryogenesis, adult-life wound healing, and importantly, Cancer where it drives metastasis of tumour cells.

The assay (not essay 😅) you are going to perform is essentially the one that Prof. Gherardi and the people he worked with used to discover HGF/SF. We still frequently use the assay in our laboratory to test new molecules that we develop to stimulate of inhibit the HGF/SF signaling pathway, in the hope that such molecules, one day, can be used to regenerate damaged organs and fight cancer in patients. You will literally make these cells scatter under the influence of HGF/SF dilutions you will prepare during the practical. In addition, we will also detach (trypsinise) cells and count these cells using techniques that all laboratories that work with cells or blood-related products use.

I hope you will enjoy the experience and the work with living cells, exposing them to a remarkable protein that we still have to completely understand some forty years after it was discovered.