MUDr. Zdeněk Kostrouch, CSc.
Zdenek Kostrouch is a senior researcher of the First Faculty of Medicine, CharlesUniversity in Prague and the Biotechnological center Biocev and the coordinator of the group Structure and Function of Cells in Their Normal State and in Pathology – Integrative Biology and Pathology. He is a Principal Investigator of the Laboratory of Molecular Pathology.
The Laboratory of Molecular Pathology focuses primarily on the possible involvement of nuclear receptors in cancers and other metabolic diseases. The research strategy is centered on nuclear receptors in Diploblasts that are likely to be closely related to Deuterostome ancestors. The laboratory also studies the regulation of metabolism and development in flatworms and in Caenorhabditis elegans and searches for parallel pathways in mammalian cell lines and in human cancers.
In our working hypothesis Deuterostomes are a sister group to Diploblasts. Modern species evolved in parallel from an evolutionary time point in the Precambrian era. Protostomes evolved more distantly laterally. We view cancers as tissues acquiring archetypical cellular behavior. We search for the regulatory roles of nuclear receptors in this archetypical behavior of cells with the aim to contribute to the understanding of the role of nuclear receptors in cancers.