Associate professor in chemical engineering earns American Cancer Society Catalyst Award
Published: Aug 31, 2026 12:45 PM
By Joe McAdory
Panagiotis Mistriotis was awarded for his project, "The Role and Predictive Implications of Downstream Migration in Breast Cancer."
Breast cancer is the second-deadliest cancer among women in the U.S., and once the disease spreads beyond the original tumor, five-year survival rates drop to about 30 percent.
Why do some cancer cells metastasize while others remain contained? Which cells are most likely to spread? Can that process be stopped before it begins?
Panagiotis Mistriotis, associate professor in Auburn University's Department of Chemical Engineering, is working to answer those questions after receiving a one-year, $150,000 American Cancer Society (ACS) Catalyst Award.
Mistriotis earned the award for his project, “The Role and Predictive Implications of Downstream Migration in Breast Cancer,” which builds on a device developed in his laboratory that sorts cancer cells based on their ability to escape high-pressure environments commonly found within tumors.
Early findings suggest that the way cancer cells respond to pressure may be linked to their ability to spread.
“We urgently need new technologies to find and target the small number of cancer cells that can escape the original tumor and travel to other parts of the body. Stopping these cells will prevent the cancer from spreading,” Mistriotis said. “Metastasis accounts for the most cancer deaths. Patients often do not die from the original tumor where the cancer started.”
While the research focuses on breast cancer, Mistriotis said that since elevated pressure is not unique to breast tumors, the findings could have broader implications for other cancers.
The ACS Catalyst Award program supports early-career researchers whose highly rated cancer studies narrowly missed funding through the ACS Research Scholar Grant program or the National Cancer Institute's flagship R01 research grant program.
Mistriotis' new project builds on previous studies from his group examining how elevated pressure influences cell migration and behavior, including work published in Science Advances and Cell Reports.
Mistriotis has earned several national and university-level honors for his research. He received an Early Career Award from the National Blood Foundation in 2021, a Career Development Award from the American Heart Association in 2022, a Maximizing Investigators' Research Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in 2022 and was named a 2024 Young Innovator by the journal Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering for his study, “Leveraging Cell Migration Dynamics to Discriminate between Senescent and Presenescent Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells.”
In 2025, he received the Biomedical Engineering Society-Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Rising Star Junior Faculty Award. He also was recognized with Auburn University's Emerging Faculty Creative Research and Scholarship Award in 2025.
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