Damon Runyon News

Without new treatment options, patients diagnosed with glioblastoma brain tumors continue to have poor survival outcomes. Dr. Aquilanti [The Ben and Catherine Ivy Foundation Physician-Scientist] aims to validate a new drug target called telomerase, a protein complex that elongates telomeres that cap the ends of chromosomes. Telomeres shorten with each cell division until they reach a critical length, and the cell stops dividing or dies. Many tumors activate telomerase to prevent the telomeres from shortening so their cells can divide indefinitely.

Earlier cancer detection usually means a greater chance of remission or cure, but cost-effective and highly specific cancer screening is not yet available for most cancers. More than 90 percent of cancers harbor aneuploidy, an abnormal number of chromosomes in a cell; this abnormality is highly specific for cancer and can be detected with DNA sequencing. Dr. Dudley [Gordon Family Physician-Scientist] is developing a new approach for detecting cells with abnormal amounts of DNA, which could identify cancer sooner.

Cancer cell populations within a tumor are often diverse, and the dynamic shifting of cell state plays a major role in treatment resistance and cancer metastasis. Dr. Copperman is utilizing tools from statistical physics and modern machine learning to predict how subpopulations of cancer cells continuously adapt to survive and eventually metastasize to other organs in the body.

Dr. Wei is focusing on inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), an aggressive disease subtype without known genetic signatures. This suggests that IBC could be highly heterogeneous (the cells within a tumor are genetically diverse), and the tumor microenvironment (the environment surrounding a tumor) may be important for disease progression and therapeutic resistance. He is developing a computational toolkit to characterize the IBC tumor spatial heterogeneity and tumor microenvironment.

Dr. Gan focuses on brain metastasis in lung and breast cancer, a major cause of death for these patients. She is applying the latest single-cell technologies and developing computational tools to dissect how tumor cells interact with resident brain cells to mediate the progression of metastasis. This research aims to better understand the formation of brain metastasis which may lead to new therapeutic strategies for prevention.

New technologies developed in the last decade have enabled chemotherapy to be delivered directly to lung tumors intratumorally in contrast to systemic delivery that affects the whole body. Recent studies have shown a partial or complete response ratio of 71% with significantly fewer side effects for patients treated intratumorally with cisplatin. Dr. Mori is modeling cisplatin pharmacodynamics following injections, taking into consideration the heterogeneity of the tumor microenvironment.

Chromosome instability (CIN), pervasive in human cancers, impacts tumor evolution and therapy response. On one hand, CIN may inactivate a tumor suppressor gene or activate a tumor oncogene and speed up the generation and evolution of cancer cells. Alternatively, CIN may induce destructive genomic changes that result in frequent cell death and impair tumor growth. Dr. Xu is investigating the overall effect of CIN on cancer progression using mathematical modeling and computational simulation coupled with a powerful 3D organoid system.

Unlike traditional drugs that bind and block the activity of key proteins in cancer cells, a new generation of drugs can eliminate proteins by hijacking the protein degradation machinery within cells. Dr. Tokheim is developing computational models that can identify degradable proteins that are linked to the development of human cancers. By leveraging big data from thousands of tumor profiles and a novel statistical and deep learning model, he will conduct an unbiased search for candidate proteins that can be verified experimentally.

Dr. Schapiro is developing methods to uncover patient-specific biomarkers that can guide therapeutic decisions for melanoma. He will collect data using miniaturized devices that enable complex measurements of tumors before and after they are exposed to drugs. Using new computational algorithms, he hopes to discover the cellular and molecular features associated with drug responsiveness and resistance to guide treatment options in patients.

Many blood cancers, including leukemia and multiple myeloma, arise when early blood-forming cells do not develop properly. These aberrant cell fate choices cause abnormal blood cells to grow and divide uncontrollably. By combining lineage tracing, single-cell RNA sequencing (scSeq), and computational analysis, Dr. Wang aims to first develop a theoretical foundation and then build computational pipelines that reliably infer the order of events in cellular differentiation from these datasets.