Ludwig Oxford’s Colin Goding was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Melanoma Research, an organization of clinicians and scientists dedicated to alleviating the suffering caused by melanoma and building bridges between basic and clinical researchers. Colin’s laboratory was the first to propose that the microenvironment, rather than genetic mutations, is the primary driver of melanoma invasiveness and progression. He and his colleagues have shown, most notably, that the microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF) plays a central role in altering melanoma cell phenotypes. MITF-low cells are drug-resistant, slow-cycling, tumor-initiating and invasive, while cells that express MITF at high levels tend to have a proliferative phenotype. Colin’s studies have examined how the expression and activity of MITF are regulated and how the protein integrates signals from the local environment to modulate melanoma cell phenotypes. This work has enriched our understanding of how microenvironmental stressors that switch cells from a proliferative to an invasive state do so by reprogramming protein translation and metabolism to impose a starvation or ‘pseudo-starvation’ phenotype. These studies are also of value to developing new approaches to treating the aggressive skin cancer. More broadly, they open a window into understanding how and why stem cells are established in melanoma and how microenvironmental forces drive cancer progression in this and other cancers.
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