Identifying additional receptors is a high priority in the laboratory. Another major aspect of our work is integrin signaling. Studies elucidating the molecular connections in these integrin-specific pathways are in progress. We also study a new anti-angiogenic factor, anastellin, which is a fragment of fibronectin. Anastellin inhibits the growth of various human tumors in nude mice and it is also anti-metastatic.
Ongoing work aims at understanding the mechanism of action of anastellin.
The anti-tumor activities may relate to anastellin's ability to affect fibronectin matrix assembly and integrin signaling in cells. Figure Legend Targeting of organ-specific vascular markers and markers expressed in tumor neovasculature with homing peptides. In a peptide library displayed on bacteriophage, each phage expresses a unique peptide, engineered by cloning a random piece of DNA into the gene of a phage surface protein. The peptide is an extension of the phage protein and will mediate binding to receptors for which the peptide has binding capacity. As explained in the text, we have used phage libraries in vivo to identify endothelial cell markers that are tissue-specific or selectively expressed in tumor vasculature.