Erik Sahai is a Senior Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute and has made multiple discoveries that have changed thinking about cancer metastasis and responses to therapy. He revealed the diverse migration strategies that cancer cells adopt in three-dimensional environments, overturning the assumption that metastatic cancers used a common invasive programme allowing therapies to work equivalently across all tumours.
Dr Sahai has exploited intravital imaging to further our mechanistic understanding of metastasis, building upon his post-doctoral work to uncover the molecular mechanisms underpinning the different mechanisms of cancer invasion, including using computational modelling to predict the effect of therapeutic interventions.