PHILADELPHIA (January 16, 2023)—Fox Chase Cancer Center is pleased to announce the hiring of Mitchell Fane, PhD, as an assistant professor in the Cancer Signaling and Microenvironment research program.
Prior to joining Fox Chase, Fane was a postdoctoral researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he focused on investigating the aged microenvironment and its effect on metastatic reactivation from tumor dormancy. From 2017 to 2019, he conducted research on the same topic at the Wistar Institute.
Fane earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in biomedical sciences at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. His doctoral dissertation focused on investigating the role of the MITF-BRN2 expression axis in melanoma progression.
At Fox Chase, Fane’s research will investigate the molecular mechanisms involved in aging pre-metastatic niches and their role in promoting cancer cell dormancy and metastatic reactivation. The clinical implications of this research may also highlight the need for a change in how to properly model cancer using preclinical models, particularly given that the majority of cancer incidence and mortality is much higher in older patients while most cancer models are done using younger preclinical animal models and most clinical trials largely recruit younger patients.
Fane’s most recent focus has been investigating the role of aging in lung fibroblasts and the effect this has on secreted soluble factors that can induce phenotypic switching between a dormant and proliferative melanoma cell phenotype. A paper on this work was published in Nature in July.
Over the course of his career, Fane has also authored multiple peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Nature Reviews Cancer, Clinical Cancer Research, Nature Genetics, and Cancer Discovery.
Fane has also served as a manuscript reviewer for several journals, including Nature Communications, Cancers, and Genes.
He is also the recipient of the K99/R00 pathway to independence grant award through the National Cancer Institute and has received several honors and awards during his postdoctoral work. These include the Larry Grossman Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Best Abstract/Travel Award for the Society for Melanoma Research Virtual Congress in 2021, and a travel award and proffered talk at the Annual American Association for Cancer Research Scientific Meeting in 2020.
Fane also has an extensive history of mentorship experience, ranging from high school to graduate students.
His appointment at Fox Chase will commence this spring.