I use engineered tissue culture models to uncover how the mechanical properties of the tumor microenvironment regulate hallmarks of cancer such as sustained proliferation, survival, genomic instability, and immune evasion.

Recent Work

  • Mechanical Regulation of Chromosome Loss

    In my postdoctoral research with Dennis Discher, I am exploring how mechanical changes in the tumor microenvironment, namely increased physical confinement of cancer cells, drive chromosome missegregation.

  • Macrophage Migration

    I am also investigating how migration through the constricting extracellular matrix of the tumor microenvironment alters macrophage behavior using 3D cell culture models as well as computational modeling. This is a CEMB collaboration between the Discher Lab and Guy Genin’s group at WUSTL.

  • Mechanical Regulation of Autophagy

    During my Ph.D., I identified for the first time that autophagy is a mechanically-regulated cell survival pathway that can be tuned to sensitize cancer cells to chemotherapy (Anlas and Nelson, Cancer Research, 2020).


    I also showed that extracellular matrix (ECM) stiffness and TGFβ-induced epithelial to mesenchymal transition synergize to promote multinucleation through cytokinesis failure (Simi, Anlas et al., Cancer Research 2018).