Damon Runyon News

A growing body of evidence links the gut microbiome—the vast collection of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in the digestive tract—to the body’s immune response to cancer. But the role of specific bacteria, and the nature of their interaction with immune cells, remain a critical subject of research. A better understanding of the crosstalk between the gut microbiota and the immune system would allow us, among other strategies, to use probiotics as part of cancer treatment.

‘‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’’ This principle, borrowed from Leo Tolstoy, is how Damon Runyon alumni Pavan Bachireddy, MD, and Catherine J. Wu, MD, summarized the conditions of immunotherapy response and resistance in a recent study.

Current imaging technology allows scientists to view tissue samples at such high resolution that they can gather information about individual cells. Looking at a high-resolution image of a tumor, for example, an oncologist can locate and measure the amount of a specific mutant protein in a cancer cell. The information gleaned from image-based single-cell analysis can aid both in diagnostics and tracking disease progression.

Matthew G. Vander Heiden, MD, PhD, former Damon Runyon Innovator and current mentor, says he gets a lot of questions from his cancer patients about how their diet might impact disease progression. Often, these patients have heard the hypothesis that an aggressively calorie-restricted diet or the low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diet may slow tumor growth. The logic for these diets is that cancer cells require high levels of glucose to fuel their rapid proliferation, so depriving them of sugar might throw a wrench in the works. However, as Damon Runyon Fellow Evan C. Lien, PhD, a postdoc in Dr. Vander Heiden’s lab at MIT, put it: “A lot of the advice out there isn’t necessarily based on very good science.”

Like a leaky gas pipe in an apartment building, failure to repair DNA damage can have disastrous consequences, including the introduction of cancer-causing mutations. This is why our cells have complex mechanisms for recognizing and repairing broken DNA strands before too much damage has been done. In a big-picture sense, we know how DNA repair works: proteins responsible for sensing damage activate a cascade of other proteins, depending on the nature and location of the problem. But a granular understanding of this process, including which genes are involved, continues to elude scientists.

Prostate cancer is among the most common cancers in American men, accounting for one in five new cancer diagnoses. Hormone therapy is currently the standard of care for patients with metastatic disease, but nearly all patients develop resistance to this treatment eventually. Extensive effort has therefore been directed toward the search for new drug targets, illuminating the biological underpinnings of the disease. Given a tumor sample from a patient with prostate cancer, researchers can now identify millions of genetic and molecular features, from single DNA mutations to RNA transcription errors to mutant protein complexes.

Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is a protein on the surface of cells that receives signals telling the cell to grow. Mutations in the EGFR gene are known to drive a number of cancers, including non-small cell lung cancer. For patients with common EGFR mutations, known as “classical mutations,” EGFR inhibitor treatments are available and effective. But such targeted therapies have not been developed for patients with atypical mutations, often leaving chemotherapy as the only treatment option.

We are delighted to announce that Damon Runyon-HHMI Fellow Tyler Starr, PhD, of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has been named a 2021 STAT Wunderkind. This award, granted annually to “the best early-career researchers in health and medicine in North America,” recognizes Tyler’s exceptional promise in the study of viruses and our immune systems.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in women worldwide, and an estrogen receptor known as ERα plays a critical role in more than 70% of these cancers. In healthy cells, when bound to estrogen, ERα activates a signaling pathway that controls cell growth, proliferation, and survival. In breast cancer, an abnormal variant of ERα sends this pathway into overdrive. For patients with ERα-positive breast cancer, estrogen-blocking hormone therapies like tamoxifen can prolong survival. Up to half of these patients will acquire resistance, however, creating an urgent need for novel treatment strategies targeting ERα.

Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) are cancers that arise when a mutated blood stem cell begins to produce too many red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. A number of mutations can drive MPNs, and studies have demonstrated that different mutations result in different clinical outcomes. For example, between the two most commonly mutated genes, JAK2 and CALR, JAK2-mutated MPNs tend to be the more aggressive cancers.