Sarah-Maria Fendt is a Principal Investigator at the VIB Center for Cancer Biology and full Professor of Oncology at
KU Leuven, Belgium. Sarah has a Master of Science degree in Biochemistry from TU Munich and a PhD in Molecular Systems Biology from ETH Zurich. Sarah worked as postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), before starting her independent research
program in 2013. 

Sarah’s lab is specifically interested in understanding the role of metabolism in driving metastasis formation and in defining the principles of metabolic regulation that enable cancer cells to communicate with and respond to their environment.

Her team applies the powerful technologies of single cell and spatial multi-omics analysis in pre-clinical mouse models and patient samples to study this interplay between cancer cells and their metabolic environment during metastasis formation. The research of Sarah’s lab has been published in high impact journals including Nature and has been funded by multiple (inter)national grants and industry, which include ERC consolidator and proof of concept grants. In 2020 Sarah has been awarded with the highly prestigious EMBO Gold Medal and was elected in 2022 as EMBO member. In 2023 Sarah received the Francqui-Collen prize (most important science prize in Belgium) and the 51st Léopold Griffuel award as well as the 2024 AACR Outstanding Achievement in Basic Cancer Research award.

Presentation

Metabolic Rewiring Driving Metastasis Formation

Metastasis formation is the leading cause of death in cancer patients. We find that metabolic rewiring is a liability of metastasizing cancer cells. For example, we discovered that extracellular remodeling of the metastatic niche, a process essential to metastasis formation, requires a transcriptional-independent regulation via the metabolites. Moreover, we provide knowledge on intratumor heterogeneity of metabolism and its role in pre-metastatic niche and metastasis formation. Thus, we study the metabolism of metastasizing cancer cells with the goal to define novel therapeutic strategies.