On the move ~ Cell motility, cancer and Nano Medicine

Dr. Kinneret Keren – Understanding how cells move.

It’s women’s basketball in Israel and it’s the top league. There is one minute left for the game and tension rises as Maccabi Haifa gets control of the ball. The other players self assemble, knowing spontaneously the correct configuration for success.

Dr. Kinneret Keren weaves between the opposition and arrives fully alert beneath the net. The ball is launched towards her; is about to be intercepted by Hapoel Tel Aviv, and with a movement of pure elegance, Keren jumps, scoops the ball and drops it into the net. Success.

If a basketball were a living cell, and if the players in a team looked like DNA assembling itself to meet the needs of the moment, then the coexistence of the career of one of RBNI’s top young scientists with an active role in national basketball would seem natural.

Named one of the 100 top young innovators in 2004 by MIT’s Technology Review magazine, Dr. Kinneret Keren is described by Prof. Erez Braun as a “real star” in the Technion Faculty of Physics, where she set up her lab less than three years ago. She is researching biological self-organization, biophysical aspects of actin-based cell motility, biomimetic systems, and artificial cells.

This research will provide insight for medical science; understanding how a cell moves through space and time can provide important information relevant for diseases as cancer and heart disease.

In one project, Keren’s lab takes the simplest system – fish skin cells – in order to find out how the cells move with consistent speed and shape. They are also taking on the experimental challenge of mimicking a living cell’s capacity of motility with the ultimate goal of creating an artificial crawling cell. “How numerous molecular building blocks self-organize into a cell that moves through space and time is still not really understood,” says Keren, “It is an open question.”

Keren integrates physics and cell biology in her research, alternating between real and artificial cells. “The biophysical aspects of cell biology have been neglected in many areas,” she explains, “Our research will help clarify the biomechanical processes in relatively simple model systems and will be relevant to more complex cells.”

Cells move by projecting filaments forward and disassembling those behind. This allows cells to be highly responsive to their environment as they are not bound by a rigid shape. “Cell structures can be extremely dynamic,” explains Keren. One project in her new lab looks deeply at what happens to the fluid inside the cell as it moves.

Keren found that fluid flows towards the cell’s leading edge and that this can increase cell speed by as much as 20 percent. “And in different cells under different conditions, it can be even greater,” she explains, “Basic cellular processes are highly relevant to understanding normal processes and diseases.

For example, understanding how and why cells move faster will help us better understand cancer metastasis.” Nano-biological self-organization is a new field. Working with three RBNI graduate students, Keren uses clean rooms to build microfluidic devices, electron microscopy facilities for studying structures and optical tweezers. Nano infrastructure at RBNI is better and more amenable than what she had at Stanford she says.

The third of four children (all scientists), and mother of three, Keren is delighted to have come to be back at Technion after her post-doc at Stanford. “I had a very soft landing here,” she smiles, “It is very welcoming. For interdisciplinary science, Technion is a very good place. It is a fun place to do research.”