The Rotary Club of Edina will welcome Dr. David Odde as the program speaker at the Thursday, May 4, meeting. Odde works on cancer research in the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota. 
 
Click on the link below for more on the speaker...
 
 
Odde has been with the University of Minnesota since 1999, concentrating on cell growth and division. According to the website, the David Odde Laboratory at the U of M seeks to discover how cells migrate and divide, and currently focuses on these processes in brain cancer progression. Both migration and division are driven largely by the dynamics of the cytoskeleton, in particular microtubules and actin filaments. The filament dynamics reflect a complex interplay of self-assembly kinetics, thermodynamics, and molecular motor-based mechanical forces.

They use three approaches in our research:
 
  1. Microscopy
  2. Modeling
  3. Microsystems
These approaches are integrated so that precise quantitative measurements of forces and velocities can be compared directly to model predictions.

Their goal is to develop experimentally-validated "flight simulators" for cancer cell migration and division, which can then be used to identify novel therapeutic strategies and guide clinical treatment.