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Nick Borcherding received a four-year NIH/NCI F30 NRSA fellowship, entitled “The Role of Paracrine WNT5A/RYK in ErbB2-driven Tumorigenesis.”

January 17, 2017

Nick Borcherding

Mr. Borcherding is an MSTP student performing his Ph.D. work under the guidance of Dr. Weizhou Zhang. The proposed studies will build upon Nick’s M.S. thesis completed in Dr. Zhang’s laboratory, examining how paracrine interactions between the basal and luminal compartment of the mammary duct regulate tumor initiation for HER2+ breast cancer.  

The preliminary findings were published in a Cancer Research article in 2015 and led to the hypothesis that the WNT5A/RYK signaling module spatiotemporally regulates breast tumor outgrowth. The implications being the understanding of how the premalignant field of the mammary duct and surrounding stroma participate in tumorigenesis. Mr. Borcherding will use transgenic mouse models and lineage specific in vitro and in vivo work to investigate the tumor suppressive mechanisms of WNT5A.