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WCLC 2016 | Using optical control of growth factor receptors for signal transduction research & drug screening

Michael Grusch, PhD of the Medical University of Vienna, Austria talks about poster on optical control of growth factor receptors to advance signal transduction research and drug screening presented at the 2016 World Conference of Lung Cancer (WCLC) of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) in Vienna, Austria. Dr Grusch explains that they are engineering receptor tyrosine kinases with a focus on mesothelioma and fibroblast growth factor receptors (FGFR). The have created variants of fibroblast growth factor receptors that can be activated with light; this part of a field of study called optogenetics. The idea is to use these optically activated receptors for studying the behavior of mesothelioma cells. Further, this method can be used for drug screening as Dr Grusch explains.