On April 24, 2017, Prof. Erwei Song visited the Institute of Biophysics with the invitation by Prof. Zusen Fan and gave a seminar entitled " Where the wild things are: The other cells in breast tumor microenviroment revolving around CCL18 signaling ". This lecture was hosted by Prof. Zusen Fan and was part of the special lecture series named “Shizhang Bei Lecture” of Institute of Biophysics. 

Professor Erwei Song is the dean of the Medical School of Sun Yat-sen University and the president of Sun Yat-sen Hospital. He is mainly engaged in the research of metastasis of breast cancer and other malignant tumors, and has achieved a series of innovative research achievements in the field of tumor cell plasticity and tumor metastasis regulated by the noncoding RNAs and tumor microenvironment. Prof. Song published 111 SCI papers, including Cell, Cancer Cell, Science Translational Medicine and other high-profile journals as the corresponding authors.

In this lecture, Prof. Erwei Song focuses on the important role of CCL18-PITPNM3 signaling pathway in breast cancer microenvironment. They found that the expression of CCL18 was significantly higher in breast cancer patients, and its expression was significantly correlated with the prognosis. Tumor activated macrophages in tumor microenvironment promote the metastasis and invasion of breast cancer cells by CCL18. At the same time, CCL18 can promote the epithelial mesenchymal transition of mammary epithelial cells. They identified PITPNM3， as the receptor of CCL18 in breast cancer cells by immunoprecipitation and mass spectrometry. By means of a series of biochemical and molecular biological methods, they found that PITPNM3 can play a similar role to GPCR protein after binding with CCL18. Professor Song also introduced some of the original data has not yet been published, showed that they use monoclonal antibody technology to block the CCL18-PITPNM3 signaling pathway for the treatment of breast cancer.

Prof. Erwei Song answered many interesting questions raised by the audience during this lecture. After that, Prof. Zusen Fan discussed some collaborative research projects with Prof. Erwei Song for the future translational medicine.