'Transmissible Cancers'

Dr. Michael Metzger is Assistant Investigator at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI) at the Seattle University since February 2018. Previously, he integrated the Columbia University and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as Postdoctoral Fellow. Author of more than 50 publications, the Metzger lab focuses on investigating questions at the intersection between genomics, cancer, and the evolution of host-pathogen interactions.

During his postdoctoral training in the Goff lab at Columbia University, he began a project looking for a new retrovirus, which was hypothesized to be the cause of outbreaks of cancer in soft-shell clams. Instead, he found that the genomes of the neoplastic cells did not match those of their hosts, and that cancer cells from different individuals were, in fact, nearly identical. This meant that these cancers are transmitted from animal to animal as a clonal transmissible cancer, which was unexpected but very exciting.

Cancer itself is not normally contagious, and the only other known cases of this are the transmissible cancers in Tasmanian devils and in dogs. The Metzger lab will study these unique transmissible cancers as a model system to understand the selective pressures that drive cancer evolution and to identify the mechanisms by which some populations have become resistant to cancer.