Biography
Dr Kermorgant is a Reader at Barts Cancer Institute (BCI), School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London. She completed her PhD in Paris (INSERM) and her postdoc at the London Research Institute of Cancer Research UK (now the Crick Institute). The research of her lab focuses on the role of c-Met endocytosis and intracellular trafficking on its signalling in cancer cells. c-Met is overexpressed in 20-80% of cancers with the level of expression correlating with metastasis and poor prognosis.
They have shown that upon activation, c-Met rapidly internalizes. However c-Met continues to signal inside the cells on endosomes. Moreover c-Met endocytosis is an important aspect of its oncogenic properties. They reported that c-Met mutants found in cancer patients are oncogenic not only because they are highly activated but also because they signal on endosomes (Nat Cell Biol 2011). They have shown that c-Met signalling from a late endosome triggers breast cancer cell migration (Nature Commun 2014). They discovered that beta1-integrin and c-Met co-traffic through a novel “Autophagy Related Endomembrane (ARE)”.
From there, the integrin plays the non-adhesive role of a scaffold to sustain c-Met signalling. This leads to cell survival in anoikis and metastasis (Nature Commun 2016). Thus they hypothesised that c-Met intracellular localisation and signalling play major roles in cancer progression. A better understanding of the molecular biology of intracellular c-Met may lead to improved cancer treatment.