Titles and Affiliations
Assistant Professor
Department of Cell Biology
American Association for Cancer Research
Research Area
Uncovering how breast cancer cells hijack sensory nerves to fuel tumor growth and metastasis, with the goal of developing new anti-metastatic therapies.
Impact
Breast cancer affects one in eight women and often becomes life-threatening once it spreads to other parts of the body, a process called metastasis. There is typically a multi-year gap between the initial tumor and the onset of metastatic spread, creating a valuable window to intervene with new therapies, yet current treatments do not specifically target the mechanisms that allow cancer cells to become metastatic in the first place. Dr. Padmanaban’s research has uncovered an unexpected and actionable driver of this process: sensory nerves, long assumed to be passive bystanders within tumors, that breast cancer cells actually depend on for critical growth, invasion, and metastasis signals.
What’s Next
For her AACR/BCRF-supported research, Dr. Padmanaban will use breast cancer models and human breast cancer samples to measure how heavily a tumor is populated by nerves and correlate this with its metastatic potential, while using three-dimensional co-culture systems to identify the specific cancer-derived signals that attract sensory nerves toward tumor cells. She will then examine how cancer exposure changes nerve gene expression and function, and test directly whether these nerve changes are required for cancer to spread. Because many existing drugs already target neural signaling pathways, this research could translate rapidly into new anti-metastatic therapies, while also improving understanding of cancer-related pain and other nerve-related complications that affect patient care.
Biography
Veena Padmanaban, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Cell Biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research seeks to define how the peripheral nervous system shapes metastatic progression and uncover new therapeutic strategies to prevent the spread of breast cancer. During her Ph.D., she discovered that E-cadherin paradoxically promotes metastasis (Nature, 2019). As a postdoctoral fellow at The Rockefeller University, she demonstrated that sensory nerves actively drive breast cancer metastasis and identified a therapeutic strategy to disrupt nerve-cancer signaling (Nature, 2024). Her work has been recognized with the Blavatnik Regional Award for Young Scientists and the ASCB Merton Bernfield Award.
