Hello everyone,

I recently started as a group leader at Turku Bioscience (TBC) and am one of the new heads of our microscopy facility, now called the Advanced Imaging Centre. While my role as group leader at TBC is new, many of you may know me from my time in our community. I did my postdoctoral training with Johanna Ivaska at TBC and later started my own lab in 2019 at Abo Akademi University, where I was also an affiliated PI at TBC.

My lab studies how (cancer) cells interact with their environments, including the extracellular matrix and other cells in health and disease. Most of our work focuses on how cancer cells migrate during metastases. We are currently investigating how circulating tumor cells survive in the bloodstream, attach to the vascular wall, and extravasate. To study these fast events, we developed FlowVision, a microfluidic, label-free, live-imaging system. With this tool, we found that pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) cells show varying levels of adhesion and sensitivity to flow, yet can be as efficient as activated leukocytes. We also showed that PDAC arrest on endothelial layers depends on the cancer cell CD44 receptor binding to endothelial hyaluronic acid. Our group helped start the new IMMENs Centre of Excellence with colleagues from Turku and Helsinki. In IMMENs, we will study how the lymphatic endothelium affects local immune responses during cancer progression.

Microscopy is central to our research. Because imaging data is complex to analyse, we build computational tools. Our lab contributed to open-source software, including DL4MicEverywhere, CellTracksColab, and TrackMate. One of our mottos is that academic software should be easy to use, interoperable, and reproducible. In this spirit, we recently released LabConstrictor, a tool that packages Jupiter notebooks as an installable App to make sharing and installing code easy.

I established my lab in Turku because our work requires access to advanced technologies, and our centre has wonderful core facilities. I am excited to be back at TBC and to work with Jouko, Kaisa, and Anna-Mari to further develop our microscopy facility. My lab and office are currently on the second floor of Biocity in the Åbo Akademi Cell Biology department.

Come and visit us.

The writer is Guillaume Jacquemet, Docent and Group Leader at Turku Bioscience