Erkki Ruoslahti, M D , Ph D Center for NanomedicineUC Santa Form

Instructions and help about Erkki Ruoslahti, M D , Ph D Center For NanomedicineUC Santa

My early research had to do with cell adhesion. Although I started it many more years ago than I care to think about, I still do some of that work and my recent work is a derivation of it. What we set out to do is to understand what keeps normal cells in their place in the body. The original hypothesis was that there would be a cell surface recognition mechanism that accomplished this task, and of course no molecules were known at that time that would work in such a way, so it was all new. But that led us, experiments that we developed to study this possibility led us to what we later on named fibronectin, which is a prototype cell adhesion molecule. Then we worked on fibronectin and particularly on its cell attachment site which we got down to a very small peptide that has then became the basis of some drugs and is still much used in the clinic and in clinical trials and so on. We then also identified receptors that bind to this peptide, now known as integrins. The cell attachment sit