HGF/SF and MET
in Metastasis

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  • Hypoxia. MET and cancer invasion
  • WNT, chemokines and MET in cancer invasion
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  • Engineering protein antagonists of MET
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  • MRC Centre, Cambridge
  • Institute for Cancer Research, Turin
  • Max-Delbrueck Institute, Berlin
  • University of Cambridge
  • Centre for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Florence
  • Leibniz Institute for Molecular Pharmacology, Berlin
  • Cambridge Molecular Therapeutics Programme
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Participant no. 1: Ermanno Gherardi, MRC Centre, Cambridge, UK

Institution

The MRC Centre in Cambridge, which houses the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, provides space for approximately 250 scientists, technicians and support staff working in 25-30 research teams. The strength of the Centre is in protein structure and engineering as well as in DNA and protein sequencing (in fact most of the current methods in DNA and protein sequence and structure were developed at the MRC in Cambridge). The Centre provides excellent instrumentation for protein expression, crystallisation (including robotics) and in-house X-ray sources as well as a strong environment for computational and theoretical biology.

Ermanno Gherardi and his group are involved in the research on:

• Crystal structure of HGF/SF-MET complexes
• Protein engineering of MET antagonists
• Low molecular weight MET antagonists

Profile of the Group

Ermanno Gherardi and his colleagues originally isolated and cloned HGF/SF from a mouse cell line and contributed to early analysis of the role of HGF/SF in development. Subsequent work includes crystal structures of a fragment of HGF/SF known as NK1 in collaboration with Tom Blundell, the domain map of the MET receptor, cryo-EM structures of HGF/SF and MET and their complexes and the crystal structure of MET in complex with InlB.

Rosario Recacha Castro is a post-doctoral fellow with considerable expertise in crystallography who worked previously on serine proteinases and several other protein families before joining the SFMET project.

Shilong Fan is a young post-doctoral fellow who recently joined the SFMET project from the Centre for Structural and Molecular Biology at the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Lauris Kemp is a postodoctoral fellow who has worked on the NK1-MET complex since 2003. She has defined the properties of this complex by mass spectrometry and small angle X-ray scattering and has produced mutants MET proteins for crystallisation.

Mark Youles is a graduate in Biology who has worked with long term experience in DNA cloning/mutagenesis. He has contributed to the domain map of the MET receptor and protein engineering of NK1 as a MET antagonist.

Further Information

• Growth Factors Group