Sebastian Kollmann and Anna Orlova receive the Agean conference Travel Award

As part of the 3rd International Conference on Cytokine Signaling in Cancer in Rhodes, Greece, the Travel Awards were again awarded this year. Two of the awards went to Sebastian Kollmann from the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology and Anna Orlova from the Department of Functional Cancer Genomics at Vetmeduni Vienna.

In the project "STAT5A and STAT5B in Hematopoietic and Leukemic Stem Cells - Between Death and Immortality", Sebastian Kollmann addresses the question of why mutations in lymphoma and leukemia patients are mainly found in STAT5B and hardly in the related protein STAT5A. It describes an important role for STAT5B in the self-renewal of hematopoietic and leukemic stem cells and thereby contributes with basic information to understand this question.

In the study “The ERBB-STAT3 Axis Drives Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease”, Anna Orlova shows that the overactivation of ERBB receptors, and consequently also of STAT3, leads to the transferability of facial tumours among Tasmanian devils. The study also unravels that the cancer cells can be specifically targeted by drug inhibition of the ERBB receptor.