TheoryLab: Recent Episodes
American Cancer Society
American Cancer Society scientists and grantees discuss the most critical questions in cancer research -- in language that we can all understand.
Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is rare and accounts for only 1% to 5% of all breast cancers, but it is considered an aggressive cancer because it grows quickly and is more likely to come back after treatment than other types of breast cancer. It causes symptoms of breast inflammation like swelling and redness, which is caused by cancer cells blocking lymph vessels in the skin causing the breast to look "inflamed."
Gayathri R. Devi, PhD, is a two-time American Cancer Society grantee who recently received a Mission Boost Grant to “boost” her inflammatory breast cancer research and move it closer to patients.
Dr. Devi joined the podcast to talk about risk factors for IBC, how it’s different from other breast cancer types, and recent advances in her lab with promising clinical implications.
Dr. Devi is Program Director for the Duke Consortium for Inflammatory Breast Cancer, Associate Professor of Surgery and Pathology at Duke School of Medicine, and the Director of the Duke North Carolina Central University bridge office as part of the Duke School of Medicine Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.
3:18 – The symptoms and signs of inflammatory breast cancer (IBC)
6:34 – How inflammatory breast cancer differs from other, more common breast cancers
9:36 – Risk factors for inflammatory breast cancer
14:22 –Instead of a single tumor mass, IBC patients have small groups of tumor cells called emboli found in the breast, skin and lymph nodes around the breast tissue. What are emboli? How do they form?
16:00 – Why do emboli form in this way?
18:51 – What makes these emboli resistant to treatment and able to spread?
21:43 – On her ACS-funded research, which focuses on the environment in which the IBC emboli form, in the breast. Why is the breast environment so important?
28:35 – Adaptive stress response
31:15 – “I’ll give you an example here and talk a little about our research findings that are clinically relevant.”
38:25 – How do we target inflammatory breast cancer therapeutically?
40:47 – The 3M approach: Models, Mechanisms, and Measures
45:30 – If she could wave a magic anti-IBC wand, where would we be in 5 years?
48:27 – The impact that ACS funding has had on this area of research
49:54 – “Another very important distinction about ACS…”
51:47 – How inflammatory breast cancer recently affected her family
The first few minutes of this conversation is for a lay audience, as Elham Azizi, PhD, and Charly Good, PhD, explained how they’re investigating what causes cancer to grow and spread and how to improve immunotherapy.
Then the discussion moved toward a scientific audience, as Drs. Azizi and Good shared recent findings and asked probing questions about future directions and opportunities in cancer research.
Elham Azizi, PhD, is a former American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow who is now an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. She joined the podcast to share findings from her recent publication, “Mapping the evolution of T cell states during response and resistance to adoptive cellular therapy” (https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(21)01471-6#secsectitle0020).
Charly Good, PhD, is an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Shelley Berger, PhD, at the University of Pennsylvania. She recently published research in Cell on “An NK-like CAR T cell transition in CAR T cell dysfunction” (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)01331-3).
FOR A GENERAL AUDIENCE
1:25 – Dr. Azizi explains how her lab uses machine learning techniques and other cutting-edge technologies to understand what’s happening in the tumor microenvironment
2:47 – Dr. Good describes the focus of her research—using the patient’s own immune system to attack cancer
FOR A SCIENTIFIC AUDIENCE
4:19 – Dr. Good describes takeaways from her recent publication on “An NK-like CAR T cell transition in CAR T cell dysfunction” (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)01331-3)
7:25 – Dr. Azizi reacts to the paper…
8:51 – …and asks why some patients didn’t see an increase in NK receptor expression
12:22 – Dr. Azizi shares findings from her paper, “Mapping the evolution of T cell states during response and resistance to adoptive cellular therapy” (https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(21)01471-6#secsectitle0020)
17:40 – Dr. Good asks: “Was it at all surprising to you when you first realized that the exhausted population was specific to the responders pre-infusion?”
22:10 – What’s next in machine learning?
26:03 – On the impact of ACS funding on their research
30:26– Why it’s an exciting time for cancer research
Corinne Leach, PhD, MPH, MS, who leads cancer survivorship research at the American Cancer Society, joined the podcast to discuss her recent publication on the rise of mental health distress during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Using data from the American Cancer Society Cancer Prevention Study-3 (CPS-3) cohort, Dr. Leach and collaborators “identified factors associated with increased depression and anxiety during the pandemic, including sociodemographic characteristics, stressors, and comorbid conditions associated with increased risk for poor COVID-19 outcomes.”* They also presented findings related to financial stressors and looked at long-term implications.
For resources and information to help you cope during and after cancer treatment, please visit: https://www.cancer.org/treatment/survivorship-during-and-after-treatment.html
Dr. Leach is Senior Principal Scientist of Behavioral Research in the Population Sciences group at the American Cancer Society. She serves as the Principal Investigator of the American Cancer Society (ACS) survivorship cohorts, including the Studies of Cancer Survivors and the Cancer Survivor Transition Study.
3:13 –Pandemic-related stressors that have been associated with greater levels of anxiety and depression
8:09 – Her recent study on how our mental and physical health prior to the pandemic factored into our ability to deal with the psychological stress of the pandemic
10:57 – On long-term implications for mental health
12:45 – A snapshot of what cancer survivorship looks like in the United States
15:09 – On similarities between cancer survivors and participants her your study whose stressors were associated with anxiety and depression
17:25 – On post-treatment programs for cancer survivors
21:51 – Helpful ways to deal with significant life stressors
- http://pressroom.cancer.org/StressorsPandemicPredictors
People going through cancer treatment sometimes have cognitive changes such as trouble remembering, paying attention, or thinking clearly.
Drs. Judith Carroll and Kathleen Van Dyk are clinician scientists who help patients with cancer-related cognitive impairment and conduct research into what causes it, how to identify patients at risk for it, and how to reverse its effects.
Judith Carroll, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, and she’s the term Endowed Chair of the George F. Solomon Professorship in Psychobiology at UCLA. She’s also a Member of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology. She received American Cancer Society funding to support her research on “Biobehavioral Vulnerability to Accelerated Aging In Breast Cancer Survivors” from 2016-2020.
Kathleen Van Dyk, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, and she’s a practicing neuropsychologist. She was an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow, studying “Cognitive Decline in Breast Cancer Survivors,” from 2017-2019.
INCIDENCE AND NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 2:09 – What is “cancer-related cognitive impairment?” Is it the same as “chemo brain?”
3:12 – How common is it?
4:41 – What kind of symptoms does it produce?
CONTRIBUTING FACTORS AND MECHANISMS 6:54 – Is cancer-related cognitive impairment a side effect of cancer? Is it caused by certain treatments?
12:11 – How has COVID impacted cognitive impairment among breast cancer survivors?
14:22 – On the biology of aging and how cancer could accelerate the aging process
TREATMENT 17:48 – Is cancer-related cognitive impairment reversible?
22:04 – On the exciting potential of sleep interventions
23:54 – Understanding the effects of endocrine therapies on brain function
CLOSING THOUGHTS
25:42 – How ACS funding has impacted their career and research
29:40 – A message they’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers who are concerned about cancer-related cognitive impairment
In this episode of the TheoryLab podcast, two American Cancer Society grantees discussed key takeaways from their recent publications.
In the first part of the conversation, which is intended for a lay audience, Dr. Joshua Andersen and Dr. Bhuminder Singh talked about targeted therapies, treatment side effects, and drug resistance.
Then they moved into a more technical discussion of their recent papers.
Dr. Andersen recently published findings showing that “TNK1 is a ubiquitin-binding and 14-3-3-regulated kinase that can be targeted to block tumor growth.” https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25622-3
Dr. Singh published a study recently showing that “Induction of apically mistrafficked epiregulin disrupts epithelial polarity via aberrant EGFR signaling.” https://doi.org/10.1242/jcs.255927
Joshua L. Andersen, PhD, is Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Brigham Young University. He is a two-time American Cancer Society grantee.
Bhuminder Singh, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Medicine and Cell and Developmental Biology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and he is also a two-time American Cancer Society grantee.
1:25 – Dr. Andersen explains why his lab is focused on improving targeted therapies
2:31 – Dr. Singh describes how his research is focused on addressing drug resistance in colorectal cancer
4:28 – Dr. Andersen dives into his lab’s new Nature Communications paper on a new cancer driver—"it’s been probably the most rewarding project that I’ve been a part of in my career”
8:11 – Dr. Singh asks a few questions about the paper: “Are there any mutations in TNK1 in human cancer?”
10:01 – What ubiquitinated proteins was it binding to?
11:44 – Is TNK1 itself ubiquitinated in certain conditions?
12:49 – Dr. Singh explains takeaways from his paper, “Induction of apically mistrafficked epiregulin disrupts epithelial polarity via aberrant EGFR signaling”
19:16 – Follow-up questions from Dr. Andersen: “How could the mistrafficking of a single ligand affect its localization so dramatically?”
22:04 – “That has to send a signal then to start trafficking the intracellular EGFR out to the apical side of the cell, right?”
27:49 – “As someone who hasn’t really thought about cell polarity very much inside a solid tumor, what would be the effects of mistrafficking in terms of the architecture of a solid tumor?”
31:18 – The impact of American Cancer Society funding on their research
When a cancer patient has a serious diagnosis, clinicians and families can struggle with how patients experience hope.
Three distinguished palliative care physicians and researchers joined the podcast for a conversation about their recent paper in JAMA titled, “Holding Hope for Patients with Serious Illness” (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2784454).
Drs. Abby Rosenberg, Robert Arnold, and Yael Schenker shared their own experiences treating seriously ill patients and talked about how we can navigate the tension between appreciating the potential therapeutic benefit of hope and being concerned about perceived unrealistic hopes:
“Rather than being concerned that hope is either so fragile that it can be lost, or so powerful that it can overwhelm decision making, clinicians should remember that hope is protective, if not necessary, for managing serious illness. Holding complex, flexible, and diverse hopes enables patients to believe in the unlikely while simultaneously accepting the inevitable. The role of clinicians is to support both.”
Abby Rosenberg, MD, MS, MA, is a pediatric oncologist and palliative care physician and researcher at the University of Washington, where she directs the pediatrics component of the Cambia Palliative Care Center, and Seattle Children’s Research Institute, where she directs the Palliative Care and Resilience Lab. She has an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Grant to study “Resilience Outcomes Among Adolescents and Young Adults with Advanced Cancer.”
Robert M. Arnold, MD, is a palliative care physician, Distinguished Professor of Medicine, and Chief of the Palliative Care Section at the University of Pittsburgh. He previously served as a member of the American Cancer Society’s palliative care peer review committee.
Yael Schenker, MD, MAS, is a palliative care physician, Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Palliative Research Center (PaRC) at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a past recipient of American Cancer Society research funding, which supported her study of “Primary Palliative Care for Patients with Advanced Hematologic Malignancies.”
3:27 - The therapeutic benefit of hope and why it’s helpful to patients and caregivers
5:12 – Why clinicians sometimes feel the need to “correct” a patient’s hope
8:56 – How physicians can address the tension of appreciating the potential therapeutic value of hope but being concerned about perceived unrealistic hopes
10:50 – On how physicians can help patients diversify and increase their hopes
6:24 – How they became interested in this topic and decided to explore this topic in a broader way
17:35 – Advice they would share with someone in medical school who might someday treat patients with a poor prognosis
19:03 – A message for caregivers of a patient with a terminal illness
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women in the United States and worldwide. Small cell lung cancer comprises 15-17% of lung cancer cases, and it is the most aggressive subtype of lung cancer, growing rapidly and spreading to other organs quickly.
Luke Hoeppner, PhD, received American Cancer Society funding to test whether therapeutically targeting a specific molecular pathway inhibits small cell lung cancer growth.
Dr. Hoeppner’s lab was the first to report that activation of this particular pathway, called dopamine signaling, inhibits other forms of lung cancer growth. By therapeutically altering the dopamine signaling pathway, he hopes to inhibit small cell lung cancer progression and drug resistance, facilitating further advancement to new treatments.
For more information about lung cancer, visit https://www.cancer.org/cancer/lung-cancer.html.
Luke Hoeppner, PhD, is Assistant Professor and leader of the Cancer Biology research section at The Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota.
5:09 – What is small cell lung cancer? What vital statistics about it should we know?
5:57 –What is the standard therapy for small cell lung cancer patients?
8:13 – Why is it so hard to treat?
10:04 – “Another way to put it is…”
13:59 – Why drug resistance is such an important area of research for small cell lung cancer
15:42 – “We’re trying to focus on understanding what in particular small cell lung cancer cells are doing to evade chemotherapy, and is there a combination treatment that we could add to chemotherapy that would prevent (resistance)?”
16:18 – On his lab’s novel approach to combatting resistance
24:17 – What are the therapeutic implications?
25:05 – Why he’s optimistic about this line of research
26:31 – On how American Cancer Society funding has impacted his research
27:18 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
According to American Cancer Society researchers, in the United States in 2021, there will be an estimated 281,550 new cases of invasive breast cancer diagnosed in women.*
Finding breast cancer early and getting state-of-the-art cancer treatment are the most important strategies to prevent deaths from breast cancer. Breast cancer that’s found early, when it’s small and has not spread, is easier to treat successfully. Getting regular screening tests is the most reliable way to find breast cancer early. The American Cancer Society has screening guidelines for women at average risk of breast cancer, and for those at high risk for breast cancer: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/breast-cancer/screening-tests-and-early-detection/american-cancer-society-recommendations-for-the-early-detection-of-breast-cancer.html.
Two breast cancer researchers joined the podcast to discuss screening for the early detection of breast cancer.
Anne Marie McCarthy, PhD is a cancer epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine. She is the recipient of an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Grant to fund her research into “A Precision Medicine Approach to Breast Cancer Early Detection.”
Lauren Teras, PhD, is a senior scientific director of epidemiology research in the Population Science team at the American Cancer Society.
7:43 – Important things to know about breast cancer risk
9:55 – Why mammography is recommended for all women - “Any woman that has breasts should think about screening for breast cancer with mammography on a regular basis”
12:50 – But mammography screening isn’t necessarily enough for all women
18:26 – On the challenges of mammography screening and aggressive cancers
23:21 – On the association of breast density with cancer risk
26:48 – Women who could benefit from more intensive screening
29:46 – On being the best advocate for yourself (What do recommendations and high-risk categories mean for an individual?)
34:45 – A message for breast cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
35:56 – The impact of American Cancer Society funding on Dr. McCarthy’s research
- https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cancer-facts-and-statistics/annual-cancer-facts-and-figures/2021/cancer-facts-and-figures-2021.pdf
“More than 50% of cancer survivors report problems paying medical bills, financial distress, or delaying and/or forgoing medical care in the past year.”*
The financial burden of cancer can affect survivors for years. And it can affect anyone: a cancer diagnosis as a young adult can have financial ramifications that can change the course of a person’s life; a diagnosis for someone who’s retired and on a fixed income can pose problems that nobody should have to face. The cost of cancer treatment also deepens disparities—not everyone can afford the most effective treatments.
Stacie Dusetzina, PhD, and Robin Yabroff, PhD, are two of the leading voices on research on the financial burden of cancer. They joined the podcast to discuss prescription drug coverage in America, problems that cause financial challenges for people with and without insurance, and potential policy solutions.
Stacie Dusetzina, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and an Ingram Associate Professor of Cancer Research at Vanderbilt University.
Robin Yabroff, PhD, is the Scientific Vice President of Health Services Research in the Surveillance and Health Equity Science team at the American Cancer Society.
*Yabroff, K.R., Zhao, J., Han, X. et al. Prevalence and Correlates of Medical Financial Hardship in the USA. J GEN INTERN MED 34, 1494–1502 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-019-05002-w
2:12 – Pain points in prescription drug coverage for Americans – for infusion therapies…
7:39 – …and for orally administered therapies
12:24 – Why it can be hard to predict financial toxicity
13:48 – An example that hits close to home – a metastatic breast cancer patient with Medicare Advantage
17:33 – The financial implications of being diagnosed with cancer when young…of paying for cancer therapies when retired and on a fixed income…and of dealing with the costs of chronic illness
22:42 – Solutions! “The most obvious one to me is fixing the Medicare Part D policy to limit total out-of-pocket spending…” https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2027580
25:34 – Ways to reduce the burden of high deductible plans
27:54 – “Despite how dire the situation you describe is, it’s actually worse.” How new advances in treatment will worsen cancer disparities unless we take action
29:30 – Evidence showing that Medicaid expansion helps, but “making care affordable is going to take a lot more than Medicaid expansion”
31:11 – “We’ve got to stop paying for the stuff that doesn’t work if we want to have better coverage for the stuff that does work.”
37:04 – Why cancer prevention strategies are key
39:00 – Advice for newly diagnosed cancer patients and their families for dealing with the financial cost of cancer
The St. Baldrick's Foundation, the largest charitable funder of childhood cancer research grants, and the American Cancer Society, a health organization dedicated to eliminating cancer, formed a partnership in 2019 to fund grants that will accelerate childhood cancer research with the goals of understanding and discovering new treatment options and improving care and survival in children with cancer.
Kathleen Ruddy, St. Baldrick’s Foundation CEO, joined the podcast to talk through the goals of this unique partnership. “Why do some patients respond better than others to a particular treatment? Why does one treatment cause more late effects than another? What else can we learn to speed up progress, to cure more children, more effectively, and less harshly?”
Then two of the grantees who have been funded through the partnership talked about what they hope to accomplish.
Yael P. Mossé, MD, is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Neuroblastoma Developmental Therapeutics Program, as well as a pediatric oncologist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Mossé’s grant is focused on improving patient outcomes for ALK mutant neuroblastoma through precision molecular targeting.
E. Anders Kolb, MD, is Vice Chairman for Research and Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, as well as Director of the Nemours Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children. Dr. Kolb’s study aims to validate the detection of novel biomarkers for the Pediatric Acute Leukemia (PedAL) Initiative Sub-trials.
0:00 – Kathleen Ruddy, CEO of St. Baldrick’s Foundation
10:25 – Yael P. Mossé, MD, and E. Anders Kolb, MD
11:29 – Drs. Mossé and Kolb on why, “in pediatric cancer care, clinical trial participation is the standard of care”
13:31 – Dr. Mossé on how her team is “bringing the science to the patient” to learn how children with neuroblastoma respond (or don’t respond) to treatments
15:57 – Dr. Kolb on why it’s so important, and challenging, to bring precision medicine approaches to childhood cancer treatment
18:37 –Dr. Mossé explains the goal “to bring the science to the clinical trials in real time and not for there to be a lag”
21:38 – Dr. Kolb highlights how revolutionary it is for Dr. Mossé to change a clinical trial based on data emerging in the lab
23:26 – Dr. Kolb explains how “the AML that kids get is nothing like the AML that older adults get” and why this matters for drug development
27:43 – “We as pediatricians are taught early on,” notes Dr. Mossé, “that kids are not small adults, and it really is the same for pediatric cancer.”
30:17 – Dr. Kolb on the inspiration he drew from an initiative by St. Baldrick’s Foundation called Project:EveryChild, and describes his new study: “what we hope is that we will be as successful in relapse as we have been in newly diagnosed AML”
32:25 – Dr. Mossé on the value of collecting tissue over time, including at relapse, and how a major part of her new study is using liquid biopsies to collect samples in a less invasive way
34:43 – Dr. Kolb on the impact of this funding: “If we’re successful, we’re going to be able to rapidly screen for relevant biomarkers and we’re going to be able to enroll kids in the therapy that has the highest potential to provide benefit.”
37:46 – Dr. Mossé describes how this funding will support her research: “My hope and my expectation is to make a really big difference for a small subset of patients. I think that’s where cancer biology has turned now—one disease is not defined by its histology; it’s defined by its underlying molecular biology.”
40:29 – A message they’d like to share with children going through cancer treatment and with their parents and families
A new publication by six current and former American Cancer Society grantees describes the challenges faced by early-career investigators as a result of the pandemic and offers recommendations “to help institutions and individuals develop effective strategies to promote success and career advancement.”
They joined the TheoryLab podcast to talk about key takeaways from their article, which “highlights the aftermath of the pandemic on work–life balance, promotion, tenure, funding, networking, and mentoring, and make recommendations that can help remediate these problems.”
“Overstretched and overlooked: solving challenges faced by early-career investigators after the pandemic” was published in the journal Trends in Cancer: (https://www.cell.com/trends/cancer/fulltext/S2405-8033(21)00158-8)
3:41 – Brock Humphries, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan.
Priscilla Hwang, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Aga Kendrick, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, San Diego Medical Center.
Rajan Kulkarni, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Dermatology at Oregon Health and Science University.
Rachel Pozzar, PhD, is a nurse scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Rebeca San Martin, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
5:10 – What does it mean to be an “early-stage cancer researcher?”
9:56 – The unique challenges faced by early-career scientists
15:01 – How the American Cancer Society encouraged a conversation about how to surmount these challenges
16:33 – Some of the most striking things they learned from each other
22:47 – Productivity issues faced by early-stage researchers
24:19 – How cancer research labs have functioned during the pandemic
29:35 – How the pandemic has impacted the tenure clock for clinician scientists
34:21 – Ways to promote mental health among early-career investigators
37:36 – Some concluding thoughts about improving the environment for early-stage cancer researchers
40:26 – Their message for cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
Two American Cancer Society grantees—one with a recent publication on the early mechanisms of lung cancer initiation, the other with a new study out on the development of melanoma resistance during the earliest phases of treatment—joined the podcast for a conversation about catching the problem early.
This conversation is geared for a scientific audience, until the last few minutes.
Sabrina Spencer, PhD, is Associate Professor of Biochemistry at University of Colorado, Boulder. She recently published a study in Nature Communications on “Melanoma subpopulations that rapidly escape MAPK pathway inhibition incur DNA damage and rely on stress signaling:” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21549-x?elqTrackId=2842c2f36cc243139afc4151f4f48ee6.
Xaralabos (Bob) Varelas, PhD, is Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine. He recently published work in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America titled, “Aberrant epithelial polarity cues drive the development of precancerous airway lesions:” https://www.pnas.org/content/118/18/e2019282118.
1:08 – Dr. Varelas on his recent study, which offered insights into mechanisms that drive the onset of lung squamous cell carcinomas
4:20 – Dr. Spencer asks clarifying questions about how they disrupted the polarity…
5:08 – …and whether the Crumbs3 mutation occurs in patients or was a way to initiate the system
7:56 – A provocative question from Dr. Spencer: “would that mean that a precancerous lesion would be a candidate for treatment with some of these clinically approved drugs?”
9:25 – “Can you connect increased ERBB signaling to actual increased cell cycling?”
10:48 – Dr. Spencer talks about her interest in the origin of drug resistance in cancer and her recent paper, which focused on melanoma
20:15 – Dr. Varelas asks how broadly applicable these findings are to other cancers
22:10 – “Why do you think some of the cells escape? Is there an underlying difference in the cells to begin with? Or are some cells randomly taking on some kind of adaptive mechanism?”
28:11 – The impact of American Cancer Society funding on their research
When tumors grow within the body they press on surrounding tissues, building up pressure. Pancreatic cancer builds up more pressure than any other cancer.
Why is that? How do cancer cells adapt to this high-pressure environment or take advantage of it?
In the words of Liam Holt, PhD, “Normal cells and early-stage cancer cells stop growing when pressure builds up. In contrast, in advanced cancer, compression can change cellular behavior to drive migration of cancer cells to other organs or confer resistance to chemotherapy… By determining the fundamental biology of pressure adaptation, we may discover strategies to treat this currently untreatable disease.”
Liam Holt, PhD, is Associate Professor at the NYU School of Medicine.
1:50 – Why do pressure and compression matter for normal cells? “From the earliest embryo through to astronauts, we can find really good examples of how cells are responding to their mechanical environment to make sure they do just the right thing.”
6:09 – What happens when a tumor starts to grow? How does that affect nearby normal cells?
11:08 – Why there is so much compressive stress inside pancreatic tumors
16:24 – If we gain a better understanding of how pressure impacts pancreatic cancer, could that help us prevent or treat cancer?
22:13 – How a high-pressure environment drives the diversity of cancer cells
26:19 – “You can usually tell if it’s a good idea because it seems super obvious”
29:06 – On an educational outreach initiative he co-founded called Science Sketches https://www.sciencesketches.org/
33:48 – The impact American Cancer Society funding has had on his research
34:59 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
In this episode, Gustavo Martinez, PhD, and Daniel Herranz, PhD, discussed their new cancer research publications. Dr. Martinez talked about his research into how T cells respond in the context of cancer, and Dr. Herrera explained his lab’s findings related to targeting cancer metabolism in leukemia.
Gustavo Martinez, PhD, is Assistant Professor at Rosalind Franklin University. He received American Cancer Society funding to support his research into T cell exhaustion and boosting our immune system’s response against cancer.
Daniel Herranz, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. His ACS-funded research focuses on T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
The first half of the conversation is more technical and is directed towards a scientific audience. The second part, starting at 17:27, is for all audiences.
1:38 – Dr. Martinez on the focus of his lab and takeaways from his recent publication in The Journal of Immunology titled, “Kdm6b Regulates the Generation of Effector CD8+ T Cells by Inducing Chromatin Accessibility in Effector-Associated Genes:” https://www.jimmunol.org/content/early/2021/04/16/jimmunol.2001459
4:40 – What are some next steps? Are there downstream targets that could be activated?
7:54 – Dr. Herranz talks about why he’s interested in targeting cancer metabolism in leukemia and shares findings published in his recent paper in Blood, “A novel and highly effective mitochondrial uncoupling drug in T-cell leukemia:” https://ashpublications.org/blood/article-abstract/doi/10.1182/blood.2020008955/475782/A-novel-and-highly-effective-mitochondrial
12:00 – Dr. Martinez asks about his thoughts regarding combination therapy
14:49 – Differences in immune response in younger patients
17:27 – Dr. Herranz provides a nice explanation of how his lab couples basic biology with a therapeutic approach
18:35 – Dr. Martinez explains his lab’s focus on modulating our own immune system’s response against the tumor cells
19:44 – They discuss the impact of ACS funding on their research and careers
23:07 – On improving diversity in cancer research and introducing younger students to science
In this episode, Ran Li, PhD, and Daniel Heller, PhD, discuss new advances in using nanoparticles to deliver drugs to cancer cells.
Dr. Li was recently the first author of a paper in Nature Nanotech that described how cancer cells could be tricked into thinking they’re starved for nutrients, causing them to increase consumption of a cancer drug attached to the protein, albumin.
Dr. Heller published a review earlier this year that “highlights recent progress in precision therapeutics and drug delivery, and identifies opportunities for strategies to improve the therapeutic index of cancer drugs and, consequently, clinical outcomes.”
Ran Li, PhD, is an American Cancer Society – Ellison Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and Instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Daniel Heller, PhD, is Associate Member at Sloan Kettering Institute at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is a two-time American Cancer Society grantee, having received a Postdoctoral Fellowship and Research Scholar Grant.
0:58 – Dr. Li describes new findings published in Nature Nanotech, “Therapeutically reprogrammed nutrient signalling enhances nanoparticulate albumin bound drug uptake and efficacy in KRAS-mutant cancer:” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-021-00897-1
3:12 – Dr. Heller notes that “I’m a big fan of this paper and had my lab do a journal club on this,” and explains what he found exciting about it
5:46 –KRAS mutant cells are “ravenously thirsty,” making them susceptible to the approach taken by Dr. Li: “By tricking the cancer cells into thinking that they’ve been starved, they do more macropinocytosis, thereby taking more albumin-bound drug”
9:32 – “Do you think this could change how people use and prescribe this drug?”
11:50 – Dr. Heller shares some of the challenges and opportunities associated with nanoparticle drug delivery outlined in his review from earlier this year on targeted drug delivery strategies for precision medicines
16:34 – Dr. Li reacts…
18:29 – …and then asks, “What do you think a major hurdle is to bringing these novel drug delivery materials and technologies into the clinic?”
21:49 – On improvements that need to be made to nanomaterials in order to enhance precision medicine
In this episode, two American Cancer Society grantees discuss recent findings related to how breast cancer patients feel about de-escalating chemotherapy as well as a new paper on comorbidities in breast cancer patients. The first half of the conversation is not necessarily technical, but it’s geared for a scientific audience. The second half is a more general discussion for a lay audience.
Avonne Connor, PhD, is a breast cancer epidemiologist focused on health disparities research. She is Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Oncology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and has a joint appointment at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. She recently published findings in the journal Cancer on “Comorbidities and the risk of cardiovascular disease mortality among racially diverse patients with breast cancer:” https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.33530
Gabrielle Rocque, MD, is a breast medical oncologist and health services researcher with an interest in quality and value in health care delivery. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at The University of Alabama at Birmingham with joint appointments in hematology and oncology as well as gerontology, geriatrics, and palliative care. Her recent paper in Cancer Medicine was on “Patient perspectives on chemotherapy de‐escalation in breast cancer:” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cam4.3891
3:02 – Dr. Rocque shares takeaways from her recent study on patients’ “interest in de-escalation trial participation, perceived barriers/facilitators to participation, and language describing de-escalation”
8:44 – How the pandemic influenced patients’ decisions
10:58 – How she became interested in exploring patient perspectives on de-escalating treatment
12:44 – Dr. Connor discusses findings on “associations between newly diagnosed comorbidities and the risk of cardiovascular disease mortality among (breast cancer) patients”
20:36 – Dr. Rocque reacts to the paper and asks, “Where do we go from here in terms of interventions?”
24:40 – On how a cancer diagnosis can prompt patients to reflect on their lives and how they can take care of their health
27:55 – Dr. Connor talks about how rewarding and exciting it is to train a postdoctoral fellow
29:39 – Dr. Rocque on her passion – how do we provide the best supportive care to patients, and how do we integrate research and clinical care?
30:50 – How American Cancer Society funding impacted their research and careers
Finding out that a loved one has cancer can bring many changes. Doctors and nurses receive years of training in patient care, but family caregivers are often thrust into this role overnight with no training on the critical processes that their loved ones depend on them to do properly every day.
Rachel Cannady—as Strategic Director of Cancer Caregiver Support at the American Cancer Society—creates resources that empower caregivers with the resources and information they need.
Visit https://cancer.org/caregivers to learn more about what to expect if you become a caregiver for a person with cancer, and get tips for making sure that you take care of yourself as well.
Among the resources there are the Interactive Caregiver Resource Guide and the Caregiver Support Video Series.
The Interactive Caregiver Resource Guide is a comprehensive tool to help you learn how to care for yourself as a caregiver, better understand what your loved one is going through, and develop skills for coping and caring. It can be accessed or downloaded here: https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/cancer-control/en/booklets-flyers/american-cancer-society-caregiver-resource-guide.pdf
The Caregiver Support Video Series provides educational support to caregivers as they assist with the everyday needs of cancer patients and provide self-care techniques to improve their quality of life. Short videos provide guidance related to, for example, drain care, managing side effects, and managing medication. It’s available at https://www.cancer.org/treatment/caregivers/caregiver-support-videos.html.
2:20 – Creating evidence-informed resources for cancer caregivers
4:12 – On the village of cancer care in the United States
6:27 – “The bigger the village, the better the help” Some of the many responsibilities of cancer caregivers—information seeking, emotional support, decision making, navigating financial concerns, etc.
9:53 – On findings from the National Quality of Life Survey for Caregivers, a study that followed a group of caregivers over eight years
16:01 – “Nearly 50% of the caregivers at post-diagnosis said that they need help helping their loved one deal with the emotional stress of cancer.”
17:30 – There’s also a positive benefit from providing care – caregiving can create meaning in people’s lives
20:33 – The Caregiver Resource Guide, the Caregiver Support Video Series, and other resources developed through the American Cancer Society’s Caregiver Support Program https://www.cancer.org/treatment/caregivers.html
29:16 – How these resources can empower caregivers and help them feel more confident, prepared, and at ease
31:20 – On the impact of COVID-19 on cancer caregiving
Elyse Park, PhD, is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Health Promotion and Resiliency Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Associate Director of Survivorship Research, and Psychosocial Services for the MGH Cancer Center Survivorship Program. Her most recent American Cancer Society grant focuses on developing a health insurance navigation program for childhood survivors.
Travis Baggett, MD, MPH, is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Director of research at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, and an MGH research scholar. His ACS grant supports research into lung cancer screening navigation for homeless people.
Sanja Percac-Lima, MD, is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a primary care physician at the MGH Chelsea Community Health Care Center, and physician leader for cancer outreach at MGH Cancer Center. A former ACS grantee, her research focuses on cancer prevention in ethnic and racial minorities.
5:42 – Dr. Park on her research into lung cancer screening, helping smokers quit, and helping survivors cope with stress and enhance their resiliency
8:46 – Dr. Percac-Lima on her research into alleviating disparities in cancer care and screening in vulnerable populations
11:39 – Dr. Baggett on a patient navigation program to help current and former homeless individuals to quit smoking and get lung cancer screening
14:32 –Taking behavioral interventions to the next level
17:14 –Reducing colorectal cancer screening disparities through patient navigation
22:09 –The encouraging progress there has been in the recognition of health equity issues
29:05 – Dr. Park on helping cancer survivors to improve their access and use of health insurance
33:38 – On the benefits of patient navigation during the COVID-19 pandemic
38:09 – On social justice and the work of the homelessness housing and health lab
41:41 – Why Massachusetts General Hospital is such a wonderful research environment
48:32 – The impact of ACS funding on their research
53:05 – A message for cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
In this episode—which is for a scientific audience until the 27-minute mark—a current American Cancer Society grantee and a former grantee spoke with each other about their recently published new findings in cancer research.
Alessandro Gardini, PhD, an Assistant Professor at The Wistar Institute, studies the epigenetic control of transcription during cell differentiation and oncogenesis. He recently published work in Cell titled “The PP2A-Integrator-CDK9 axis fine-tunes transcription and can be targeted therapeutically in cancer:” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34004147/.
Yuan He, PhD, is Assistant Professor (but just received word that he’s being promoted to Associate Professor!!) at Northwestern University. The He lab The He lab uses cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and other biophysical and biochemical approaches to understand “the molecular mechanisms by which large, multi-subunit complexes engage in DNA-centric processes.” Dr. He recently published findings in Science on, “Structure of the human Mediator-bound transcription preinitiation complex:” https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/52.
4:12 – Dr. Gardini describes his new paper: “what we found is that when you combine CDK9 inhibition with activation by small molecules of the PP2A phosphatase…we get a much better block on transcription in these tumors…”
9:10 – Interesting question from Dr. He on the mysterious integrator complex
11:11 – “What do you think about this tug of war of the phosphatase competing with CDKs…?”
14:19 – Dr. He shared takeaways from his new paper: “And this eventually allowed us to build a model of how this gigantic 57-sub-unit machinery recognized CTD from the polymerase…”
19:11 – Dr. Gardini professes his love for CTD
20:39 – “What do you think is the threshold of phosphorylation in order for the mediator to start losing affinity…?”
25:36 – “Could we possibly think that both mediator and integrator are actually bound to non-phosphorylated CTD at the same time or could there actually be competition…?”
27:46 – Why is this work important? Why should a cancer patient, survivor, or caregiver be excited about these publications?
Lisa McKenzie, PhD, has a new American Cancer Society research grant to explore the relationships between oil and gas environmental exposures and childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
The award builds upon her preliminary studies, which suggested that children living near oil and gas wells “may be economically disadvantaged and at greater risk for childhood leukemia.”
According to Dr. McKenzie—who is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado’s School of Public Health—approximately 3 million children in the United States live within one mile of an oil and gas well.
In this episode, Dr. McKenzie explains how she plans to evaluate the association between exposures from oil and gas development and childhood leukemia risk and why this work is critically needed to support state and federal policy.
4:51 – Lisa McKenzie, PhD, Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado’s School of Public Health
6:11 – On fracking and how oil and gas are removed from the ground
8:38 – How tapping into unconventional resources such as shale has brought the oil and gas industry into more communities
11:12 – On concerns that communities have raised about oil and gas environmental exposures
13:49 – What we know about carcinogens associated with the oil and gas industry
15:57 – On childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)
18:19 – Why it’s particularly concerning for children to be exposed to carcinogens
23:38 – Has proximity to oil and gas activity been associated with childhood ALL?
25:10 – How many children in the United States live near such activity?
26:07 – How she plans to build on her preliminary data using American Cancer Society funding
28:35 – Why she hopes her research could make a difference for parents and children
32:13 – On the state, national, and global policies for oil and gas environmental practices
34:07 – How ACS funding will allow her to continue her research
35:46 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
In this episode—which skews more toward a scientific audience until the last five minutes—two American Cancer Society grantees spoke with each other about their recently published new findings in breast cancer research.
Sonia de Assis, PhD, is interested in epigenetic inheritance: “In addition to genetic material or DNA, our parents also pass to us molecular memory of their environmental exposures, and that can affect our risk or predisposition to disease including cancer.”
Matthew Sikora, PhD, focuses on invasive lobular carcinoma, a type of invasive breast cancer. He feels that “advances in treatment are hindered by our poor understanding of the distinct biology of invasive lobular carcinoma,” and his lab has identified a potential therapeutic target.
Sonia de Assis, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Oncology at Georgetown University. She recently published findings showing that, “systemic alterations play a dominant role in epigenetic predisposition to breast cancer in offspring of obese fathers and is transmitted to a second generation:” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-86548-w.
Matthew Sikora, PhD, of the Univ. of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus and DC, is an Assistant Professor of Pathology. His latest work is titled, “Mediator of DNA damage checkpoint 1 (MDC1) is a novel estrogen receptor co-regulator in invasive lobular carcinoma of the breast:” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33947745/.
1:49 – Dr. de Assis on epigenetic inheritance and her recently published findings
5:30 – Reactions from Dr. Sikora and what stood out to him about Dr. de Assis’s findings: “Figure 2A really smacked me in the face and just got me going…”
9:23 – “Do you think it’s actually the tRNA levels that are different that are causing the phenotype, or are those indicative of a different epigenetic context in the sperm?”
11:31 – “One thing I want to make clear is that we think the non-coding RNAs act with a hit-and-run effect…”
12:35 – Dr. Sikora on invasive lobular carcinoma and his new publication
16:08 – Invasive lobular carcinoma versus invasive ductal carcinoma
19:12 – “That’s a fabulous question, and my R01 reviewers had the exact same question a few cycles ago…”
22:27 – “How do you see using MDC1 as a therapeutic target because of this dichotomy that’s a tumor suppressor but also an oncogene?”
24:30 – They note some interesting connections between their work
27:13 – Dr. de Assis explains why it’s important to understand epigenetic memory
28:50 – Dr. Sikora describes why he became interested in invasive lobular carcinoma
In this episode, three researchers from Dartmouth who are investigating very different aspects of cancer joined the podcast to share their work. One of the guests, James Moseley, PhD, summed up why a diversity of scientific approaches and collaboration among researchers is so important:
“We’re all in this together. There are so many different angles to fighting cancer, whether it be here at Dartmouth—where we’ve got folks working on the level of cells and proteins all the way up through patient care and beyond—or through the ACS. This is really a team effort, and we’re all kind of working on our individual parts, but (this is) a reminder that we’re all working together to tackle all these different aspects of cancer with the ultimate goal of helping patients and survivors.”
Amber Barnato, MD, MPH, MS, is the Susan J. and Richard M. Levy 1960 Distinguished Professor in Health Care Delivery. Her research focuses on variation in end-of-life intensive care unit and life-sustaining treatment use.
Kathleen Lyons, ScD, is Associate Professor of Psychiatry. Here research focuses on cancer rehabilitation and palliative and supportive care.
James Moseley, PhD, is Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology. His lab studies how cells coordinate cell growth and division.
5:10 – Dr. Barnato on making sure that end-of-life care aligns with personal goals, helps manage symptoms and emotional distress, and supports families
7:08 – Dr. Lyons on how rehabilitation science helps with symptom management and side effects from cancer treatment
9:24 – Dr. Moseley on a different kind of decision making – how a cell decides that it’s going to divide
13:02 – How early engagement of palliative care in cancer care improves quality of life and symptom management and can help extend life
16:02 – On the growing understanding of why “prehabilitation” before treatment is so important
20:24 – What we’ve learned from technological breakthroughs that have allowed researchers to watch individual proteins in cells
27:20 – Dr. Barnato’s focus on medical decision making and patient-provider relationships
29:42 – How Dr. Lyons is focused on accelerating recovery from treatment and helping patients get back to doing the activities they want to do
35:30 – Dr. Moseley poses an interesting question: How does a cell know what size it is?
39:10 – On the collaborative, supportive environment at Dartmouth
40:49 – The impact of ACS funding on their research
49:55 – A message they’d like to share with cancer patients, caregivers, and survivors
To understand how cancer develops and spreads, and to develop better therapies, it’s critical to understand the tumor microenvironment, the immediate area around a tumor that “helps generate a supportive niche for it to develop and grow.”
Johanna Joyce, PhD, joined the podcast to explain that the diverse normal cells around a tumor are enmeshed with cancer cells. They’re integrated. They communicate and influence each other’s functions.
Her lab’s goal is “to try and either block this cellular conversation or redirect it towards a more constructive dialogue that helps fight the tumor and not support it.”
Johanna Joyce, PhD, is Professor at the University of Lausanne and Full Member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.
4:32 – What is the tumor microenvironment?
6:00 – Why it’s similar to the immense complexity of a forest’s ecosystem
8:19 – Do tumors somehow create or remodel their microenvironments?
12:42 – “The tumor microenvironment can have a major impact on how a given cancer responds to therapy in a number of different ways…”
18:23 – On the unique aspects of the tumor microenvironment in the brain
22:02 – On her fantastic new study showing that different brain cancers have different microenvironments based on whether the tumors started in the brain or spread to the brain
28:15 – Surprising findings from that study – the immense complexity and diversity of immune cells in the tumor microenvironment
32:12 – How can we translate these findings to the clinic?
36:22 – Why it’s so important to understand how different lifestyles, diets, levels of activity, and environmental exposures impact patients’ tumor microenvironments
38:20 – The impact that American Cancer Society funding had on her career
40:41 – Her message for cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
When Delaram Cavey was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer seven years ago, she was fortunate to have two wonderful daughters to help her along her journey.
Delaram and her older daughter, Catherine Cavey, joined the podcast to share the story of Delaram’s cancer diagnosis and treatment.
They also talked about how the cancer experience has sparked an interest in science in their family. Catherine has created an educational resource to raise awareness of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations, and they’ve founded GoMENA to create pathways for immigrant girls of Middle Eastern and North African descent to become engineers in the United States (https://gomena.us/).
Delaram Cavey is a career member of the United States foreign service. Her daughter, Catherine Cavey, is in the 10th grade at Edison High School in Fairfax, Virginia.
5:09 – The story of Delaram’s lung cancer diagnosis
9:08 – Catherine on her memories of her mom’s diagnosis
12:54 – What it was like for Delaram, as a never smoker, to learn she has lung cancer
13:46 – How the cancer journey brought their family closer together
17:05 – How Catherine has helped raise awareness of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations
20:40 – How her mom’s experience has impacted Catherine’s career goals
23:42 – On living your best life, every day
28:46 – Advice from Catherine for other children whose parents are diagnosed with cancer
29:36 – Why they founded GoMENA to create pathways for immigrant girls of Middle Eastern and North African descent to become engineers in the United States https://gomena.us/
Melanoma is much less common than some other types of skin cancers, but it is more dangerous because it’s much more likely to spread to other parts of the body if not caught and treated early.
While there have been some exciting advances in melanoma research in recent years, there is much left to learn about, for example, how it spreads, how it resists treatment, and therapies could be improved.
In this episode, three scientists at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center who are investigating different aspects of melanoma explain why it’s a challenging disease, describe recent advances against it, and underscore why there are so many reasons to be excited.
4:11 - Andrew Aplin, PhD, is Associate Director of Basic Research at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center and Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology.
Chris Snyder, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.
Neda Nikbakht, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Biology at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.
4:42 – Dr. Aplin on his research into why melanoma is so resistant to therapy
5:59 – Dr. Snyder on his work into why the immune system sometimes doesn’t seem to recognize cancer
8:11 – Dr. Nikbakht, a dermatologist who sees patients with skin cancer, discusses how she studies the skin microbiome to learn what properties promote melanoma
10:43 – The tremendous recent advances in melanoma treatment
13:59 – What we’ve learned about the immune system in recent years
18:02 – A physician’s perspective on recent advances in melanoma research
22:04 – The big picture goal of Dr. Aplin’s research
26:51 – Dr. Snyder’s move into cancer immunology
32:00 – Dr. Nikbakht on the tremendous importance of patient samples in research
37:46 – How the collaborative environment at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center enhances their research
43:26 – The impact of ACS funding on their work
47:16 – Why advances made during the push to develop COVID-19 vaccines could be very impactful for cancer research
49:01 – A message they’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
Lung cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer, but if it’s found at an earlier stage, when it is small and before it has spread, it is more likely to be successfully treated.
To take us through the state of lung cancer screening in the US—big picture issues, challenges faced by patients and clinicians, and reasons for excitement—we were joined by two leading experts in the field.
Christopher Slatore, MD, MS, is an investigator for the Portland VA Health Service Research and Development Center of Innovation, Center to Improve Veteran Involvement in Care (CIVIC). He’s Associate Professor of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, and he’s a pulmonologist who conducts lung cancer screening. He’s also an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Grant recipient.
Anne Melzer, MD, MS, is Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. She is an Investigator at the Minneapolis VA Center for Care Delivery and Outcomes Research. And she is a pulmonologist who is the medical director of the lung cancer screening at the Minneapolis VA.
The American Cancer Society recommends annual lung cancer screening with a low-dose CT scan for certain people at higher risk for lung cancer. Visit cancer.org for details: https://www.cancer.org/health-care-professionals/american-cancer-society-prevention-early-detection-guidelines/lung-cancer-screening-guidelines.html
4:18 – Welcome Dr. Melzer and Dr. Slatore
5:51 – Dr. Melzer on the lung cancer burden in the United States
8:46 – Dr. Slatore on the state of lung cancer screening in the US
12:08 – Some of the big picture problems they’re trying to solve related to lung cancer screening
16:47 – The US Preventive Services Task Force’s recent recommendation regarding lung cancer screening: https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recommendation/lung-cancer-screening
23:01 – Challenges that exist for patients when it comes to lung cancer screening
25:28 – Some of the frustrations clinicians have with lung cancer screening
30:39 – “We need to make it easier for patients and primary care providers to do lung cancer screening.”
34:57 – It all comes down to an old Seinfeld episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T2GmGSNvaM
36:31 – The impact of ACS funding on Dr. Slatore’s research
37:28 – The aspect of her research that Dr. Melzer is most excited about
38:50 – Messages they’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
The American Cancer Society is committed to maintaining a broad cancer research portfolio—any type of cancer, within any part of the cancer research continuum.
This episode is a perfect example of this commitment and features three cancer researchers from the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.
Kathy Shair, PhD, studies how the Epstein-Barr virus causes cancer. Sarah Hengel, PhD, is investigating why unrepaired DNA leads to cancer. And Yuri Bunimovich, MD, PhD, conducts research into the role of our body’s nerves in melanoma growth.
1:47 – Yuri Bunimovich, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology and member of the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy program at Hillman Cancer Center
Sarah Hengel, PhD, is an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow at the Hillman Cancer Center in the Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology in the Kara Bernstein lab.
Kathy Shair, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and an investigator in the Cancer Virology program at the Hillman Cancer Center
3:11 – Dr. Shair on how her lab is focused on understanding how chronic infections can turn bad and result in cancer
4:13 – Dr. Hengel’s research into a subset of breast and ovarian cancers
6:17 – Dr. Bunimovich on the role of nerves in the tumor microenvironment in melanoma and other cancers
12:13 – Dr. Shair on recent advancements that help us understand the circumstances under which the Epstein-Barr virus can lead to cancer
22:24 – Dr. Hengel explains how our improved understanding of different mutations is leading to more personalized therapies
26:38 – Dr. Bunimovich explains how melanoma can injure nerves, creating an immune-suppressive environment that protects the melanoma from the body’s immune response.
35:16 – Dr. Shair on how Epstein-Barr viruses’ interference with DNA repair can be used to our advantage
38:00 – Dr. Hengel on how gathering more information about these mutations is critical to developing novel therapeutic targets
40:29 – The three aspects of his research Dr. Bunimovich is most excited about
45:28 – Dr. Shair and Dr. Hengel talk DNA repair and studying cancer in model organisms
47:21 – Dr. Bunimovich and Shair on viruses and cancers
51:42 – The impact of ACS funding
53:45 – A message for cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
At first glance, the work of Eva Hernando and Thales Papagiannakopoulos might not seem to have much in common.
Dr. Hernando studies the contributions of non-genetic alterations to the aggressive behavior of melanoma. Dr. Papagiannakopoulos is applying CRISPR/Cas9 to study lung cancer.
But in this conversation, Drs. Hernando and Papagiannakopoulos take us through the ins and outs of their research into why cancer grows and spreads, and we learn how they learn from each other, how NYU Grossman School of Medicine encourages collaboration, and why new directions in cancer research have them feeling optimistic.
3:05 – Eva Hernando, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Pathology and Assistant Dean for Research at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Thales Papagiannakopoulos, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
5:26 – Dr. Hernando on why cancer cells metastasize
10:10 – Why she studies metastasis in melanoma
13:28 – Dr. Papagiannakopoulos on why it’s so hard to understand what the cancer genome is telling us
20:50 – Dr. Papagiannakopoulos on why he studies lung cancer
23:32 – Dr. Hernando on the biggest challenge she’s facing as a melanoma researcher
27:42 – Dr. Papagiannakopoulos on new directions in lung cancer research
30:34 – On encouraging research collaborations at NYU
35:16 – How ACS funding has impacted their cancer research
Pancreatic cancer is a terrible disease.
“The 5-year relative survival rate for all stages combined is 10%,” according to Cancer Facts & Figures 2021. “Even for the small percentage (11%) of people diagnosed with local disease, the 5-year survival rate is only 39%.*”
But cancer researchers are learning more every day about how to find pancreatic cancer early and develop targeted therapies.
Laura D. Wood, MD, PhD, a clinician scientist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, joined the podcast to explain why pancreatic cancer is difficult to detect early and how her team is approaching the problem.
2:34 – Laura D. Wood, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology and Director of GI Pathology in the Division of Gastrointestinal and Liver Pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. And she’s an American Cancer Society Research Scholar.
3:32 – As a graduate student she was among the first in the world to sequence the whole exomes of human tumors. What are whole exomes?
5:38 – Why this accomplishment was important and how much technology has advanced since then
9:03 – How a more complete picture of the cancer genome changes our understanding of that cancer
13:37 – Why early detection of pancreatic cancer is such a clinical challenge
17:13 – “It’s actually on course to be the 2nd-leadest cause of cancer death within a few years”
21:15 – What she’s learned from genetics about the development of precancerous lesions in the pancreas
24:56 – How it’s different from colorectal cancer screening
26:37 – How can we tell which lesions are going to turn into cancer?
29:36 – On growing mini-tumors in fancy science jello to understand cancer cell invasion
31:37 – How she is studying pancreatic cancer from both ends of the spectrum
33:01 – How her clinical training and knowledge of genetics and morphology helps her think about what research questions matter to cancer patients
34:56 – Progress she hopes to see in the pancreatic cancer research field in the next 5 years
36:54 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
*Source: https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cancer-facts-and-statistics/annual-cancer-facts-and-figures/2021/cancer-facts-and-figures-2021.pdf
How can we use the exceptional greed of cancer cells against them?
They gobble up all the resources in their local environment, spread to another area, and then gobble up more resources.
Thales Papagiannakopoulos, PhD, explains that there’s a cost to that. A cancer cell takes a lot of fuel, but it produces a lot of waste. It has a few tricks for getting rid of that waste, such as taking advantage of antioxidants in our diet, but Dr. Papagiannakopoulos and his team are exploring some innovative approaches to this problem.
In this conversation, Dr. Papagiannakopoulos takes us through cancer metabolism and the implications of ACS-funded cancer research that has moved into clinical trials.
3:30 - Thales Papagiannakopoulos, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine
4:26 –What does metabolism do for normal cells? How does the metabolism of immune cells help them fight off infections?
9:03 – How does a cell’s need for energy change as it becomes a cancer cell?
11:06 – Cancer cells as factories
15:02 – How a higher metabolism can also damage cancer cells…
17:01 – How cancer cells accumulate and clear out free radicals
23:50 – How cancer cells take advantage of antioxidants in our diet
26:44 – Exciting therapeutic implications resulting from these insights
32:17 – How ACS funding helped move his research into clinical trials
A key challenge in treating some cancers is the ability to distinguish tumors that are likely to metastasize from indolent disease that can be managed with active surveillance.
Dr. Peder Larson has developed a non-invasive imaging method based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure the rate at which a tumor creates lactic acid and transports it out of cells.
In this conversation he explains how the technology works and how he hopes to create imaging biomarkers to identify cancers that require aggressive therapy.
3:13 – Peder Larson, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Residence and a Principal Investigator in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the University of California, San Francisco. He’s also a core member of the joint UC Berkeley–UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering.
4:13 – How oncologists use imaging data
8:57 – How does MRI work?
13:11 – How MRIs are used in treatment decisions…
15:56 – …and some of their limitations
17:44 – How we could use MRIs to understand cancer metabolism
21:55 – On the special type of MRI focused on differences in metabolism, called Hyperpolarized carbon-13 magnetic resonance imaging, how it works, and why it’s so cool
25:43 – How he’s improved this technology
28:57 – The impact of ACS funding on cancer research
31:25 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors and caregivers
Screening can prevent colorectal cancer through the detection and removal of precancerous growths (polyps), as well as detect cancer at an early stage, when treatment is usually less intensive and more successful.
People living in rural areas are much less likely to undergo screening due to a number of barriers, but some rural clinics have achieved high colorectal cancer screening rates despite such constraints.
Dr. Jennifer Weiss of the University of Wisconsin-Madison joins the podcast to talk about how these clinics have been successful in “developing relevant, impactful, and sustainable approaches to increasing colorectal cancer screening in rural communities.”
The American Cancer Society recommends regular colorectal cancer screening for people at average risk starting at age 45: https://www.cancer.org/healthy/find-cancer-early/american-cancer-society-guidelines-for-the-early-detection-of-cancer.html.
4:45 – Jennifer Weiss, MD, MS is Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s a two-time American Cancer Society grantee.
5:21 – Why she has described colorectal cancer as the “most preventable, but least prevented cancer”
8:15 – The American Cancer Society recommends regular colorectal cancer screening for people at average risk starting at age 45
13:19 – On why where you live can impact access to colorectal cancer screening
16:23 – Some rural clinics are doing better than others in terms of colorectal cancer screening and outcomes…
20:11 – …why is that? What are they doing right?
22:58 – A great real-life example of a rural clinic boosting screening rates
29:05 – Gaps that she hopes her research will fill
30:23 – What she’s most excited about
33:18 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors and caregivers
Dr. Nicole Steinmetz is well on her way in her mission to “push new frontiers in medicine and bio-nanotechnology through the design, development and testing of materials and biologics derived from plant viruses.”
Plant viruses? Plant viruses.
They’re non-infectious to humans. When injected into a tumor the immune system is alerted to their presence; finding no threat from the plant virus the immune cells fight the tumor instead.
Dr. Steinmetz talks us through the technology she’s developed, explains how it can advance immunotherapy, and gives us a glimpse of how she and her team are applying this platform toward COVID-19 vaccine development.
1:52 – Nicole Steinmetz, PhD, Professor of NanoEngineering and Director of the Center for Nano-ImmunoEngineering at the University of California, San Diego
2:34 – What are nanoparticles? Why are they useful in medicine?
7:11 – The Ballad of the Ferrari and the Geo Storm
9:25 - How nanoparticles are useful in cancer diagnostic and therapeutic approaches
14:36 – Using plant viruses as nanotechnology (“They’re also naturally expert at the delivery of cargo” such as cancer therapeutics.)
20:40 – How her lab is using plant virus-based nanotechnologies to improve immunotherapy delivery
27:08 – How plant viruses nicely synergize with checkpoint therapies
31:04 – How nanotechnology has been applied to COVID-19 vaccine development
33:04 – The role her lab has played in developing COVID-19 vaccine candidates using plant viruses “that we could ship at room temperature around the world to people’s homes…You don’t even need to see a doctor; you can apply it like a bandage to get the vaccine.”
35:05 – On how this is a platform technology that could be used against the next strain, the next mutant, the next virus
36:28 – How support from the American Cancer Society has impacted her research
38:06 – Her message for cancer patients, survivors and their caregivers
Stick around until the end for a few bonus questions on Baldeneysee, surfing, whales, and her favorite teacher growing up
When it comes to how diet affects colorectal cancer risk, it’s not just a question of whether you eat your fruits and vegetables. Are you eating the right combinations of foods? How do your dietary patterns influence your metabolism? How does genetics play a role?
Dr. Fred Tabung just received an American Cancer Society research grant to explore these questions. He talked about how his study will identify specific groups for which certain dietary patterns might play a significant role in increasing or decreasing colorectal cancer risk.
Fred Tabung, PhD, MSPH, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at The Ohio State University and the Division of Medical Oncology at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.
5:30 – Why the nutritional epidemiology of cancer is important
7:05 – On some current trends in colorectal cancer diagnosis and mortality
8:48 – Why he thinks the impact of our habitual dietary patterns on our metabolism and gut microbiome could impact colorectal cancer risk
11:53 – Why insulin could be important in the development of colorectal cancer
14:40 – Why it's important to look at food combinations
18:02 – On his new ACS-funded study that includes more than 700,00 men and women across four continents…
20:00 – …and how it could lead to exciting new opportunities to impact risk for colorectal cancer through changes to dietary patterns
24:07 – Some helpful advice about specific healthy food combinations
25:45 – A message he’d like to share with the donors who made his ACS research grant a reality
While working as program directors at Georgia Institute of Technology’s VentureLab—Georgia Tech’s incubator for technology startups—Melissa Heffner and Sara Henderson saw an opportunity to create a program for female entrepreneurs.
Female Founders is “a four-week virtual cohort experience where participants gain a foundational knowledge of lean startup methodology and customer discovery while tackling topics associated with the specific journey of female-led startups:" https://www.icorpssouth.com/female-founders-initiative.
Ms. Heffner joined the TheoryLab podcast along with three participants in the program to share advice for evidence-based entrepreneurship and talk about the exciting technology that is behind their respective start-ups.
Melissa Heffner is a program director with Georgia Institute of Technology’s VentureLab and the co-creator of Female Founders.
Ana Luz Quiroga Campano, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Biological Systems Engineering Laboratory at Emory University and Georgia Tech. She’s also the CEO of SANICKA.
Allyson Jennings McKinney is a PhD candidate in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Kacie Kaile is a PhD candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Florida International University.
5:03 – On the purpose and goals of the Female Founders program
5:49 – Why they saw a clear need for a program specifically for female entrepreneurs
9:54 – Some of the ways they’re helping to set female entrepreneurs up for success
11:08 – Allyson Jennings McKinney on what attracted her to Female Founders
12:44 – On Solopulse—an exciting new technology she’s developed that utilizes a single pulse of a wave to create images of the surrounding environment—and its potential clinical impact
16:10 – Dr. Ana Luz Quiroga Campano on how the Female Founders program has met her needs as a postdoctoral fellow
18:21 – On the precision chemo-immunotherapy software tool developed by her company, SANICKA
21:45 – Kacie Kaile on how Female Founders has changed her entrepreneurial approach
23:37 – On a product she’s developed that provides a diagnostic assessment of tissue oxygenation using a smartphone with an add-on tool
28:43 – Dr. Quiroga on why scientists shouldn’t feel hesitant about becoming an entrepreneur when they have an idea
30:04 – Ms. McKinney with good advice on getting started as an entrepreneur
31:41 – Ms. Kaile on the benefits of starting a company with support from an academic institution
33:37 – Ms. Heffner with advice for cancer researchers thinking of starting a company in the oncology space
The troubling increase of early-onset colorectal cancer incidence and mortality has led to a shift in the age at which the American Cancer Society recommends beginning colorectal cancer screening, from age 50 to age 45.
What are some of the biological and environmental factors that might be behind this rise in early-onset colorectal cancer? How can we prevent it?
And what is behind the troubling racial and ethnic disparities we see in colorectal cancer incidence and mortality?
Joining us to take us through these issues is one of the leading researchers in this space. Peter Campbell, PhD, is Scientific Director, Epidemiology Research, in the Population Science Department of the American Cancer Society.
4:05 – The main areas of focus in his research program
7:26 – The differing incidence and mortality rates for colorectal cancer in younger and older Americans
10:57 – On racial/ethnic colorectal cancer disparities
13:26 – Digging into the “why” behind some of these trends
19:36 – How the American Cancer Society is trying to reduce disparities and reverse the rise of early-onset colorectal cancer
23:04 – On the Colorectal Cancer Pooling Project
26:18 – Where his team hopes this work could lead in 5 years
28:37 – Thoughts on tumor heterogeneity (One of the challenges of colorectal cancer is that not only are tumors different from patient to patient, but they differ within individual patients as time progresses. Could these molecular differences in tumors could be associated with lifestyle? How could we find out?)
31:58 – On what it might mean for colorectal cancer survival if there are associations between how we live and colorectal cancer heterogeneity
The collaboration between Claudia Benavente, PhD, and Michael Emanuele, PhD, is a perfect example of how cancer researchers with overlapping interests but very different expertise can come together to find a new path forward in cancer research.
They found each other through the American Cancer Society’s online community for current and former cancer research grantees.
The Benavente Lab had previously identified a new protein with exciting therapeutic potential that is critical for tumor metastasis. Independently, the Emanuele Lab found that this protein is tightly controlled by a cellular machinery that functions to eliminate proteins within the cell.
Together, they are collaborating on an ACS-funded research project to determine how this protein is made, how it functions, and how it’s eliminated, with the goal of creating novel target therapeutics for patients with triple-negative breast cancer.
2:55 – Claudia Benavente, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Michael Emanuele, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the UNC Cancer Center.
4:04 – What is triple-negative breast cancer? What does ‘triple negative’ mean?
7:48 – On a protein called UHRF1 that has therapeutic potential in other cancers with similarities to triple-negative breast cancer. What does UHRF1 do in normal cells?
10:50 – Why is it important in cancer cells?
13:45 – How Dr. Emanuele and Dr. Benavente struck up a collaboration through TheoryLab, the American Cancer Society’s online community for current and former research grantees
17:35 – “…maybe we could take advantage of the cell’s innate ability to get rid of UHRF1 and sort of trick it into shutting it off itself—not just shut it off, but get rid of it altogether…”
21:47 – How their complementary skill sets and expertise will help them figure out the best approach to target how UHRF1 is made, how it functions, and how it’s eliminated, with the goal of creating novel target therapeutics for patients with triple-negative breast cancer
25:41 – Steps they will take to determine the potential of therapeutically regulating UHRF1 removal in triple-negative breast cancer
28:54 – What most excites them about this project
32:46 – Keys to a productive scientific collaboration
34:56 – On the impact of ACS funding on their research
37:33 – A message they’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
What does studying how cells communicate in round worms have to do with cancer in humans?
In order for cancer cells to multiply indefinitely and metastasize to another part of the body, they have to communicate with each other. Understanding how they do that is critical to developing the next generation of cancer therapeutics.
As American Cancer Society grantee Theadora Tolkin, PhD, puts it, “The signals that cancer cells use to communicate with one another are exactly the same signals that our healthy cells use every day to keep us alive and well. The difference between healthy communication and communication that leads to cancer, however, may have to do with the levels of signal sent or received. Sometimes, a cell becomes a cancer cell because it stops listening to the cells around it. Other times, cancer gets started when a cell thinks it hears a signal that’s not there.”
In this conversation, Dr. Tolkin helps us understand the signal that she’s studying, called Notch, and how problems with Notch signaling can lead to cancer in different ways.
Theadora Tolkin, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Langone Health in the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, in the lab of Jane Hubbard, PhD.
5:02 – Just a fantastic story about her unusual road to a career in science
10:42 – Why C. elegans, a round worm, is such a useful model system for understanding cancer
12:56 – Why it is particularly important to understand how/why/when cancer cells communicate
15:33 – On the critical cancer relevance of how proteins and chemicals used in communication are used to ‘signal’ from one cell to another and within individual cells
19:03 – On working towards a new understanding of cell communication
22:33 – “I think these are the biggest open questions when it comes to blood cancers…”
24:06 – How a deeper understanding of Notch is an important step towards better treatments for cancer patients
27:19 – How her American Cancer Society research grant application was selected by a donor group for funding and what it was like to find out that her work was funded
30:34 – How ACS funding has impacted her research and career goals
32:34 – A message for other women considering a career in science and bringing your whole self into the lab
HPV, or Human Papillomavirus, is a common virus that can cause six types of cancer. While there is no treatment for HPV, there is a vaccine that can prevent it.
The HPV vaccine works best when given between ages 9 and 12, for boys and girls, and it is safe, effective, and long-lasting.
Jenny Grandis, MD, is at the forefront of translational research in head and neck cancer. She joined the podcast to talk about the prevalence of HPV-associated head and neck cancers, why they can be hard to detect, why the side effects can be so devastating, and why prevention through vaccination is so important.
She was joined on the podcast by Adrienne Murr, a high school student who recently completed a summer internship in the Grandis lab. Ms. Murr talked about what she took away from her experience in the lab. And she offered helpful advice for parents talking to their children about HPV vaccination. She wrote an op-ed on the subject titled, "HPV is a threat to your children. Vaccines are not.”
Jenny Grandis, MD, is the Robert K. Werbe Distinguished Professor in Head and Neck Cancer in the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of California, San Francisco. She was named an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor for her seminal contributions to the field.
Adrienne Murr is a senior at Tamalpais High School in San Francisco, California.
Fore more information about HPV vaccination, visit: https://www.cancer.org/healthy/hpv-vaccine.html
5:18 – On the association of head and neck cancers with infection by the human papillomavirus (HPV)
6:52 – The increasing prevalence of HPV-associated head and neck cancers
9:51 – Why HPV-associated head and neck cancers are hard to detect
11:15 – How they are treated, and why the side effects can be problematic
14:07 – Prevention is the answer
15:28 – On why the vaccine needs to be administered at ages 9-12
18:14 – What it was like for Adrienne to work in Jenny’s lab
19:54 – How her experience in the lab changed her perspective on the HPV vaccine
21:59 – Why it is so important for girls AND boys to get the vaccine
25:42 – How parents can talk to their children about HPV vaccination, and some helpful resources to help parents communicate the importance of the vaccine
28:51 – On the strange but ultimately delightful experience of mentoring a high school student during a pandemic
30:57 – How her experience interning in Dr. Grandis’s lab informed an op-ed Adrienne wrote, "HPV is a threat to your children. Vaccines are not.”
33:26 – How funding from the American Cancer Society has impacted Dr. Grandis and her research
36:30 – Wonderful advice from Adrienne for other young women interested in a research career
American Cancer Society scientists recently released a new report, “Blueprint for cancer research: Critical gaps and opportunities,” that sought to highlight the work needed to develop better tools and strategies to limit cancer as a major health concern.
Our guest, Lynne Elmore, PhD— Senior Scientific Director of Cell Biology and Preclinical Cancer Research at the American Cancer Society—led the effort to “integrate conversations with over 90 leading cancer experts to highlight current challenges, encourage a robust and diverse national research portfolio, and capture timely opportunities to advance evidence‐based approaches for all patients with cancer and for all communities.”
The full article, “Blueprint for cancer research: Critical gaps and opportunities,” can be found at: https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3322/caac.21652
All eight ACS blueprint articles are available here: https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.3322/(ISSN)1542-4863.ACS_Cancer_Control_Blueprints
2:37 – Dr. Lynne Elmore of the Extramural Discovery Science team at the American Cancer Society
3:58 – The role of this team in funding cancer research around the country, launching the careers of cancer scientists, and giving hope to cancer patients and caregivers
7:12 – What were the motivations behind writing “Blueprint for Cancer Research: Critical Gaps and Opportunities?”
10:41 – The collaborative approach taken to producing the Blueprint, which incorporated diverse perspectives from scientists and clinicians on the front lines of cancer treatment
15:30 – What major themes emerged from this Blueprint?
20:40 – The most surprising observations in the Blueprint, such as early detection developments related to liquid biopsies
23:59 – What she hopes readers will take away from the Blueprint, and three ways that cancer patients and survivors can help advance research
30:01 – Important parallels between the Blueprint and the work of the Extramural Discovery Science Department at the American Cancer Society
34:45 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients, caregivers and survivors
Early detection of cancer through screening reduces mortality from cancers of the colon and rectum, breast, uterine cervix, and lung (see https://www.cancer.org/healthy/find-cancer-early/cancer-screening-guidelines.html). Cancer mortality has declined in recent decades in part due to progress in cancer screening technologies, awareness, research, and the general population’s improved uptake in screening services.
But far too many individuals for whom screening is recommended remain unscreened, and this situation has been aggravated by the substantial decline in cancer screening resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the pandemic-related disruptions will likely exacerbate existing disparities in cancer screening and survival across groups of people who have systemically experienced social or economic obstacles to screening and care.
Deana Baptiste, PhD, MPH—the American Cancer Society’s Director of Guideline Development Process—joined the TheoryLab podcast to talk about why cancer screening remains a public health priority and an essential service.
REFERENCES: ACS Guidance on Cancer Screening During COVID-19: https://www.acs4ccc.org/acs-guidance-on-cancer-screening-during-covid-19/ American Cancer Society screening guidelines: https://www.cancer.org/healthy/find-cancer-early/cancer-screening-guidelines.html
3:44 – The role that screening plays in decreasing cancer mortality
6:08 – Pre-pandemic, were we where we wanted to be as a country in terms of cancer screening?
9:05 – On the concerning drop in cancer screening resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic
13:58 – Have measures that have been put into place to make hospitals safe for patients during the pandemic had unintended consequences on screening?
20:09 – Why cancer screening remains a public health priority and essential service
24:36 – Strategies to get cancer screening back on track
31:42 – How screening disparities have been impacted by the pandemic
35:47 – Some ways to deal with the “unprecedented backlog in cancer screening”
43:10 – Lessons learned from the pandemic that will inform our ability to better deliver cancer screenings appropriately, safely, and equitably
Every year the American Cancer Society estimates the number of new cancer cases and deaths that will occur nationally and in each state. Published annually since 1951, “Cancer Facts & Figures” provides the most current information about cancer. These widely cited projections serve as a basis for research, are a valued resource by policymakers, and are also readily understood by the public.
How many new cancer cases are there projected to be in 2021? What are the current cancer incidence, mortality, and survival statistics? What’s the latest information on cancer symptoms and risk factors?
The just-released “Cancer Facts & Figures 2021” and “Cancer Statistics 2021” provide a comprehensive breakdown of the most up-to-date cancer statistics. This year’s report also includes a special section on cancer and COVID-19. To find Cancer Facts & Figures 2021, as well as slides and an interactive tool where you can dive deeper into the data, visit http://cancer.org/statistics
Rebecca Siegel, MPH, is lead author of these publications. She is a cancer epidemiologist and Senior Scientific Director of Surveillance Research at the American Cancer Society. Ms. Siegel directs the production of 7 Facts & Figures publications and their accompanying scientific articles, including the Cancer Facts & Figures 2021, which was published January 12.
Her other research focuses on disparities in cancer incidence and mortality with an emphasis on colorectal cancer, particularly early-onset disease. Her research contributed to a shift in the age at which the American Cancer Society recommends beginning colorectal cancer screening.
3:00 – Rebecca Siegel on Cancer Facts & Figures 2021 and Cancer Statistics 2021
4:54 – Where does this cancer data come from?
8:01 – The differences between Cancer Facts & Figures 2021 and Cancer Statistics 2021
10:30 – What makes these publications so important?
13:16 – On the importance of her team’s findings on early onset colorectal cancer, and how this research led to an update in guidelines on when to start screening
17:37 – Findings shared in the special section on COVID-19 and cancer
22:15 – On what findings surprised her in this year’s edition
24:47 – A hopeful takeaway from Cancer Facts & Figures 2021
NCI-designated Cancer Centers play leading roles in their communities through cancer research, cancer prevention and control, and clinical research.
Being the director of a Cancer Center is a position of immense responsibility. Now imaging taking on that role during a pandemic.
Joann Sweasy, PhD—the inaugural holder of the Nancy C. and Craig M. Berge Endowed Chair for the Director of the University of Arizona Cancer Center—joined the podcast to talk about her approach to the position and how the Cancer Center has dealt with the challenges presented by COVID-19.
She also talked about her lab’s ongoing research into DNA damage and repair and how that relates to cancer.
And she spoke at length about mentoring, women in science issues, and what it was like to study under Dr. Evelyn Witkin, one of the leading cancer researchers of our time. Dr. Witkin helped change our understanding of DNA repair. In 1946, when the American Cancer Society’s extramural research program was launched, Dr. Witkin was one of the first female researchers funded by ACS.
3:33 – Joann Sweasy, PhD, Inaugural holder of the Nancy C. and Craig M. Berge Endowed Chair for the Director of the University of Arizona Cancer Center
5:09 – On the role that NCI-Designated Cancer Centers play in cancer prevention, clinical service, and research
8:32 – How her colleagues at the Cancer Center have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic to continue supporting cancer patients, caregivers, and researchers
10:07 – On how the pandemic has provided some unexpected silver linings
13:19 – Some of the ways that research into COVID-19 will benefit cancer patients
17:14 – On her lab’s research into DNA damage and repair and why this is critical to understanding cancer
20:08 – Recent research findings in her lab that she’s most excited about
25:08 – What it was like to train under the great Dr. Evelyn Witkin
28:08 – On some of the caregiving and work-life balance challenges faced by cancer researchers in 2020…
31:11 – …and how academic institutions and research funders could help
34:58 – Advice for young women pursuing a career in science
36:58 – The impact of ACS funding (and peer review) on her career
39:49 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
Dr. Stacey Finley develops mathematical models to better understand cancer, tumor growth, and the effectiveness of different therapies.
Her team creates a mathematical representation of what’s happening in biology, so they can understand how reactions are happening in cells, how cells are interacting with one other, and how that influences the growth of a tumor.
They can use that data to create simulations and make predictions about what could happen, all with the goal of finding more effective treatments for cancer patients.
Using mathematical modeling, “we can try as many ideas as we can think of, in a shorter amount of time, with fewer resources, and with fewer dollars to spend, compared to doing experimental studies.”
Dr. Finley provides the best explanation of mathematical modeling you’re likely to hear. But she also spoke at length about her approach to scientific mentoring and had wonderful advice for other young women of color who are aspiring scientists.
Stacey Finley, PhD, is Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Gordon S. Marshall Early Career Chair at the University of Southern California.
3:51 – On systems biology and why it’s important to understand networks of reactions happening inside of cells instead of looking at one reaction at a time
5:38 – Why the immune system is a nice platform for looking at system-level behavior
8:22 – Mathematical modeling? What is that?
11:00 – Some great examples of how mathematical models are helpful to understanding cancer
15:20 – The process: use experimental data and clinical data to build a reliable mathematical model to make useful predictions; do simulations; make predictions; work with collaborators to test and validate the predictions; impact patient care
19:03 – An aspect of her research she’s particularly excited about
26:23 – Her approach to scientific mentoring and lessons she’s learned along the way
31:18 – Advice for aspiring mathematicians, scientists, and engineers who are young women of color
35:05 – Ways that she thinks funding agencies could make careers in cancer research more inclusive
40:01 – How ACS funding has impacted her research and career
45:04 – A message she’d like to share with people whose lives have been impacted by cancer
Lung squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) is the 2nd most common sub-type of lung cancer, accounting for around 30% of lung cancer diagnoses.
And it is a particularly deadly disease that’s characterized by poor therapeutic response, a high relapse rate, and poor prognosis. Furthermore, unlike other subtypes of lung cancer, to date there are no therapies to specifically target the LSCC subtype.
Verline Justilien, PhD, has an American Cancer Society grant to study an oncogenic protein called Ect2. Too much of it is a bad thing, and the more you have of it as a LSCC patient, the worse your prognosis is. What if we could know which patients have a worse prognosis, so we could treat them more aggressively? What if a therapy could target Ect2?
Dr. Justilien takes us through her very promising research into a kind of cancer where we urgently need progress. And she also
Verline Justilien, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology at the Mayo Clinic.
3:28 – What is lung squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC)?
5:33 – A goal of precision medicine is targeting and treating specific tumor types; but no therapies are available that specifically treat LSCC. Dr. Justilien talks about why that is.
8:40 – What is an oncogene?
9:53 – Why is the Ect2 oncogene so important…
11:54 - …and why is it so important in this sub-type of lung cancer?
14:33 – Could the levels of Ect2 in a lung squamous cell carcinoma patient be used to predict patient outcomes?
17:49 – On how her team is trying to target Ect2 therapeutically
19:04 – How ACS funding has impacted her research
21:08 –What advice would she have given to her high school self to encourage her to accomplish her dreams?
23:14 – While female college students of color report interest in STEM majors at an equivalent rate as white women students, they remain the least represented group in STEM. What could be done to attract and retain more women of color in research? How could ACS help?
26:39 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients, caregivers, and survivors
The number of adults aged 85 and older is expected to triple by 2060, due in large part to better treatments and a decline in tobacco use. Because cancer risk increases with age, demand for cancer care in this population will continue to grow.
William Dale, MD, PhD, joined the podcast to talk about the needs of older adults who are cancer patients and how we can better meet them.
He also talked about “The Elephant in the Room,” a film executive produced by Dr. Dale and his wife that depicts the real-life experiences of Bonnie Freeman, who was a nurse practitioner at City of Hope. Ms. Freeman, who wrote the screenplay for the film, tragically passed away shortly before the film’s release.
The film, which is available on Amazon Prime, is about a “comical nurse practitioner who treats his patients in an unconventional way, is challenged by a tough and stubborn patient, but is determined to show him the bright side, even when the end is so close.”
Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Room-Niko-Vitacco/dp/B08GCNTZXQ IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8857090/
William Dale, MD, PhD, is Chair of Supportive Care Medicine and Director of the Center for Cancer and Aging Research at City of Hope, a comprehensive cancer center near Los Angeles. 4:49 – Unmet needs for older adults who are cancer patients
9:47 – On barriers preventing senior cancer patients from enrolling in clinical trials
13:34 – What strategies might decrease these barriers?
17:27 – Misconceptions and opportunities for impact in the field of palliative care
22:02 – On “The Elephant in the Room”
24:40 – How he hopes the film could help advance palliative care, and how it draws on the real-life experiences of nurse practitioners and social workers at City of Hope
29:36 – How to find “The Elephant in the Room” on Amazon Prime, and how a number of colleagues in medicine have commented on its realism
32:21 – How the American Cancer Society has impacted his research and clinical care
37:15 – Current research pursuits that he’s most excited about
42:19 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors and caregivers
Clinical trials are the key step in advancing potential new cancer treatments out of the lab and into the clinic. Patient participation in trials is crucial to this success.
But only a small fraction of patients end up enrolling in a cancer clinical trial due to barriers that make participation difficult or even impossible. As a result, approximately 20% of cancer clinical trials fail due to insufficient patient enrollment. Understanding and addressing these barriers is critical to accelerating progress in cancer research.
Mark Fleury, PhD, is Policy Principal at ACS CAN – the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (https://www.fightcancer.org/). Dr. Fleury joined the podcast to help us understand where we are falling short and how we can reduce these barriers to patient enrollment in clinical trials.
5:36 – What is ACS CAN?
7:55 – A recent piece of cancer-related legislation where ACS CAN was involved that he is particularly proud of
13:07 – Why clinical trials in cancer research are so important to patients
16:23 – On barriers to clinical trial enrollment: ACS CAN resources note that “approximately 20% of cancer clinical trials fail due to insufficient patient enrollment.” Why are we falling short?
22:50 – Some of the recommendations ACS CAN has helped identify that would reduce barriers to enrollment in cancer clinical trials
27:04 – How clinical trial matching services could be improved
32:38 – On disparities in clinical trial participation
Resistance to treatment – it’s one of the most important issues in cancer research. If cancer cells aren’t killed during treatment, either because they weren’t affected or because they changed enough to survive the treatment, it could lead to cancer recurrence.
Tuomas Tammela, MD, PhD, has an American Cancer Society grant to explore resistance to treatment in lung adenocarcinoma, the most common subtype of lung cancer.
In this conversation he walks us through new findings from his lab on the “highly plastic state” of certain cells in tumors. He explains how this relates to tumor heterogeneity, why this is a problem in lung cancer and other cancer types, and how it could be used in combination therapies.
Tuomas Tammela, MD, PhD, is Assistant Member at the Sloan Kettering Institute at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
3:01 – What does it mean for cancer to become resistant to treatment?
5:24 – What does resistance to treatment mean in terms of the cellular makeup of a tumor?
7:21 – A helpful way to understand “tumor heterogeneity”
9:31 – What it means for cells to be in a “highly plastic state” and why that’s importance to treatment resistance and cancer progression
13:05 – Is the “highly plastic cell state” seen in different cancer types and…
14:46 – …could it be targeted therapeutically?
16:51 – How tumor heterogeneity impacts treatment resistance in lung cancer
20:42 - If later stage lung cancer tumors are more heterogenous, what could help us understand how to treat them?
25:12 – On how American Cancer Society funding has impacted his research
26:41 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients and caregivers
It is no exaggeration to say that Jennifer Temel, MD, has helped change how cancer care is practiced.
Through her research, she has shown that integrating palliative care and oncology care from the time of cancer diagnosis improves patient outcomes. This early integrated care model is now the standard of care in the United States and many other countries.
Now, however, because it’s the standard of care, demand for early palliative care is so great that the palliative care workforce is unable to meet every patient’s needs.
So Dr. Temel is now working to use novel healthcare technologies—such as telehealth and mobile apps—to deliver patient-centered palliative care to cancer patients and their families everywhere.
Jennifer Temel, MD, is an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor. She is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Cancer Outcomes Research Program at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.
2:17 – On what motivated her to become an oncologist
3:20 – What is palliative care? How can palliative care differ from the care provided by an oncology clinician?
4:48 – On the importance of early palliative care for patients with serious cancers
7:06 – On her seminal research findings showing that integrating palliative care with oncology care leads to better outcomes
8:32 – How cancer caregivers are impacted by palliative care
10:21 – On how palliative care is typically offered, drawbacks to the current delivery system, and communicating well with patients and their families
16:30 – On being named an ACS Clinical Research Professor
17:40 – On the goals of her ACS-funded work: using healthcare technology to better support and inform cancer patients…
21:25 – …and the three technologies she’s focused on
28:35 – How the pandemic has impacted the need to be innovative in how palliative care is provided
32:49 – How ACS and the cancer community at large can help scale her findings
35:46 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients and caregivers
Just as telemedicine is changing the ways in which primary care is delivered, much of cancer care can be delivered safely, effectively and less expensively from home.
Penn Home Infusion Therapy has been providing infusion therapy at home for around two decades, but starting last year, in November 2019, just a few months before the pandemic started to complicate health care in America, Penn Medicine launched Cancer Care at Home.
A joint initiative of the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation, the Center for Healthcare Innovation and the Division of Hematology and Oncology at Penn, the goal of the program is “to establish the home as a place where appropriate patients can receive appropriate care.”
In this conversation, Dr. Justin Bekelman and Katherine Major describe the benefits of Cancer Care at Home, some of the barriers for home care that exist in America, and how the program navigated a 700% increase in patient care when the Covid-19 pandemic took hold in America.
Justin Bekelman, MD, a former American Cancer Society grantee, is Professor of Radiation Oncology and Medical Ethics and Health Policy as well as the Director of the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation.
Katherine Major, MSN, RN, CHPN, is a registered nurse and a director of Penn Medicine at Home. She oversees the Penn Home Palliative Care and Penn Home Infusion Therapy programs.
6:09 – The benefits of delivering cancer care at home
9:17 – On how cancer care is delivered at home – What treatments can be administered safely and effectively at home? What symptoms can be managed in home environments?
14:43 – On sorting out who can be treated at home and who needs to be treated in a clinical setting
18:54 – On the staffing resources needed to safely provide cancer care at home
22:35 – On some of the roadblocks patients, caregivers and care teams need to navigate
27:14 – How the Cancer Care at Home program navigated the difficult period when the pandemic startd to take hold in America
31:42 – Some wonderful patient stories
36:47 – How ACS funding helped Dr. Bekelman “take science from inception to scale”
39:18 – A message they’d like to share with cancer patients, caregivers, and survivors
Dawn Hershman, MD, MS, was recently named an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor for the seminal contributions she’s made to the field of cancer health services research.
Her contributions to the field are so wide ranging and impactful, they defy summary.
From identifying patients who are at risk of receiving poor cancer care and intervening to improve their outcomes, to conducting trials to improve patients’ compliance with care, to examining strategies to manage cancer-related toxicities, Dr. Hershman’s work has had a remarkable impact on cancer patients’ quality of care and quality of life.
She has also been a leader in health equity and cancer disparities, demonstrating why Black cancer patients may have worse outcomes and improving clinical trial recruitment and retention of Black patients.
Dawn Hershman, MD, MS, is Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center.
3:49 – What kinds of things can stand in the way of patients receiving optimal cancer therapy?
8:01 – On breast cancer patients who are more at risk than others for poor treatment and outcomes
11:55 – On what the cancer treatment community should be doing NOW to improve quality of care for breast cancer patients and narrow disparities
15:12 – On the many different ways we could improve quality of life for breast cancer patients
18:36 – Why QOL issues can be challenging for patients and physicians
23:07 – On the significant impact that the expense of cancer treatment can have on breast cancer patients, and possible cost reduction strategies
26:02 – On what she hopes to accomplish with her new American Cancer Society ACS funding…
28:09 – …and how she hopes her research could help patients
29:44 – How organizations such as the American Cancer Society could help disseminate her findings
32:19 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors and caregivers
In the TheoryLab podcast, we usually highlight the work of American Cancer Society scientists and funded researchers. But in this episode, we speak with some amazing women who exemplify why we support cancer research.
In this two-part episode, you'll hear from a metastatic breast cancer THRIVER, a cancer survivor, and the managing director of Making Strides Against Breast Cancer (MSABC).
(2:49) First, we spoke with Valerie Mortimer—a metastatic breast cancer thriver—and Joya Harris—a stage 3 breast cancer survivor. They shared what it was like to be diagnosed with breast cancer, how they found strength during their journey, and advice they have for newly diagnosed patients. They also talked about how helpful it can be to become part of a community of survivors and caregivers.
(26:40) In the second half of the episode, we spoke with Susan Petre, Managing Director of Making Strides Against Breast Cancer. What is Making Strides? How much money is raised through it, and how does the American Cancer Society use those funds? She also talks about how the event has changed this year in response to the pandemic. And she ends by talking about some of her favorite memories from Making Strides events over the years.
Siran Koroukian, PhD, is a leading health policy and health services researcher whose work bridges health equity, big data, public health, and cancer.
In her new study—funded through a collaboration between the American Cancer Society and Flatiron Health—Dr. Koroukian will use real world data from Flatiron’s national de-identified oncology datasets curated from electronic health records. Using clinical and genomic data gathered from routine care, she will explore patterns of genomic testing and precision medicine among patients with metastatic colon cancer.
With this research she hopes to “unravel new opportunities to improve the quality and equity of cancer care in colorectal cancer patients with metastatic disease, thus informing new interventions to improve cancer outcomes, and lead to a more equitable distribution of scarce healthcare resources.”
Siran Koroukian, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. She also leads the shared resource on population cancer and analytics within the comprehensive cancer center. And she’s a four-time American Cancer Society grantee. She was recently the recipient of the American Cancer Society Flatiron Health Real-World Data Impact Award to advance patient-centric research.
2:23 – On informed cancer care and management and why it’s important for colorectal cancer patients
4:34 – Current treatment guidelines for colorectal cancer patients with advanced or metastatic disease
10:25 – Why are colorectal cancer patients who are young and healthy but underserved not receiving genomic testing and personalized therapy?
15:18 – On how inefficiencies in the health care system and the overuse of finite health care resources contributes to disparities
19:48 – How her research into Flatiron Health datasets—which include patients of all ages with many kinds of insurance status—will show who is benefiting from precision medicine and who is not…
20:55 – …and how her research could help more patients benefit from precision medicine
23:22 – The impact of ACS funding on her career
26:00 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
Leticia Nogueira, PhD, MPH—Senior Principal Scientist in the Data Science Research team at the American Cancer Society—has broken new ground with her research into climate change and cancer.
In 2019, she published work showing how disasters such as hurricanes can interrupt the provision of oncology care. Radiotherapy is particularly vulnerable, because it requires dependable electrical power and the daily presence of specialized teams and patients for treatment delivery.
She followed that up this year with a look at how climate change increases exposure to carcinogens and disrupts access to cancer care:
“Climate change is already increasing cancer risk through increased exposure to carcinogens after extreme weather events such as hurricanes and wildfires. In addition to increasing cancer risk, climate change is also impacting cancer survival. Extreme weather events can impede patients' access to cancer care and the ability of cancer treatment facilities to deliver care. For these reasons, cancer treatment facilities should ensure that their disaster preparedness plans can withstand climate threats and should evaluate and mitigate their own contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, many actions that address climate change also reduce carcinogen releases or exposures.”
(Article: Climate Change and Cancer, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, July 2020, https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3322/caac.21610)
1:28 – How she first became interested in this line of research
3:53 – On how climate change increases cancer risk
4:44 – Recent examples of extreme weather increasing our exposure to carcinogens
6:49 – How climate change and resulting extreme weather events has impacted cancer care
10:27 – Why cancer patients are especially vulnerable to the effects of natural disasters on their care
11:58 – What cancer patients can do to be prepared if disaster strikes, and some helpful resources
14:26 – How cancer care facilities can make themselves more resilient to the threats of climate change
16:50 – On the carbon footprint involved in cancer care, and some interesting ways it could be reduced
20:10 – What listeners can do to help
22:11 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
What is it that goes so wrong when cancer cells develop the ability to divide indefinitely?
Dr. Johannes Walter joined the TheoryLab podcast to help answer that question. He and his lab are at the leading edge of discovery science aimed at understanding DNA replication and repair, areas that are critical to understanding cancer and developing new therapies.
Johannes Walter, PhD, is an American Cancer Society Research Professor, Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School, and Member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Research Professor. He’s also the co-founder of MOMA Therapeutics, which aims to “discover the next generation of precision medicines by targeting the molecular machines that underlie human disease.”
3:04 – What is DNA? Why is it so important to cell division?
7:39 – What causes DNA damage?
11:34 – How damaged DNA is most often repaired
14:36 – When DNA repair goes wrong
17:43 – Using frog egg extract to study DNA repair and understand cancer in humans
21:44 – Why frog egg extract? Why not an extract from human cells?
24:47 – While cells have around 10 different strategies for repairing DNA, his lab is studying a process where DNA repair is coupled with DNA replication
29:05 – On what can go wrong in a cancerous cell
32:00 – “Synthetic lethality” – an exciting way that his research into DNA repair could lead to improved cancer treatments
35:27 – How his team recently began to work on something called strand discontinuity
38:13 – How ACS funding has impacted his career
40:34 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
The American Cancer Society has updated its guideline on diet and physical activity for cancer prevention.
Dr. Laura Makaroff—Senior Vice President of Prevention and Early Detection at the American Cancer Society—joined the podcast to explain how staying at a healthy weight, staying active throughout life, following a healthy eating pattern, and avoiding or limiting alcohol may greatly reduce a person's lifetime risk of developing or dying from cancer.
At least 18% of all cancer cases in the US are related to a combination of these factors. These lifestyle habits are the most important behaviors after not smoking that people can control and change to help lower their cancer risk.
The updated guideline reflects the latest evidence published since the last update in 2012. It appears in the American Cancer Society’s peer-reviewed journal, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians: https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3322/caac.21591. A summary can be found on our home page: https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/american-cancer-society-updates-guideline-for-diet-and-physical-activity.html.
2:05 – Background on the Guidelines for Diet and Physical Activity and why they were updated
3:23 – How the guidelines are intended for a broad audience of health care professionals, policymakers, and the general public
6:32 – On the impact of body weight on cancer risk
11:04 - Why preventing weight gain as we age is important
14:01 – “Move more, sit less” and the link between physical activity and post-menopausal breast cancer
18:06 – On healthy lifestyle patterns and accommodating slip-ups while maintain a healthy pattern
24:09 – Recommendations for alcohol consumption
25:48 – “If you could eliminate just one obstacle to our engaging in healthy behaviors, what would it be?”
28:05 – ACS resources that can help people make better decisions about their health behaviors
30:15 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
It’s difficult to comprehend how busy and densely packed it is on the inside of a cell. But understanding cell structure and organization is critical to developing new cancer drugs.
Isaac Klein, MD, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Richard Young Laboratory at the Whitehead Institute, recently published findings that could have wide-ranging implications for the understanding of how cancer drugs work.
Dr. Klein joined the podcast to explain why knowing how to get cancer drugs to exactly the right place in a cell—at a sufficient concentration—is critical to developing new and more effective cancer treatments.
Isaac Klein, MD, PhD, is the American Cancer Society Layla Rohani Postdoctoral Fellow. His grant was specially funded by the Rohani Family and Friends. He is a physician and scientist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center and Whitehead Institute at MIT.
4:11 – What is it like inside of a cell? Is organization a challenge for cells?
8:30 – A great analogy to help us understand cell organization and “condensates,” and why it’s important for some sub-compartments in cells not to have membranes walling them off from other parts of the cell.
13:47 – With no membranes, or walls, how do the contents of a condensate stay together?
19:50 – How cancer drugs are pulled into different condensates
23:02 – How cancer drugs get to the right spot in a cell, at the right concentration
26:23 – How the cancer drug Cisplatin works
31:07 – How their research findings hint at ways to make cancer drugs more powerful
35:03 – The impact of ACS funding on his research
36:24 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
The financial burden that can result from cancer treatment is a widespread problem that not only affects quality of life—it can also affect care and outcomes for patients.
But many of the things that lead to financial hardship can be changed, like health insurance coverage and communication with providers about anticipated costs of care.
Robin Yabroff, PhD—Senior Scientific Director of Health Services Research at the American Cancer Society—is leading the way in research into why and how financial problems affect cancer patients and survivors.
4:33 – On how expensive it is to go through cancer treatment, the variation in cost for different types of cancer, and financial challenges that are unique to cancer survivors
6:50 – On different categories of financial hardship: material, psychological and coping.
9:29 – Is financial hardship a common concern for cancer patients?
12:00 – An age group of cancer patients that tends to be more impacted by financial hardship
15:33 – How health insurers have been shifting cost to patients with higher deductibles, co-payments, and co-insurance
18:30 – The cumulative financial burden of patients: “They might not be experiencing financial hardship within the first month or two of treatment, but by 12 months after cancer treatment has started, a recent study showed 75% of cancer survivors reported things like having to refinance their house, taking out major debt, or having a change in income of at least 20 percent…”
20:14 – How consistent findings on financial hardship are, regardless of patient population, time since diagnosis, type of financial hardship, etc.
23:38 – Where she sees the greatest potential for impact
28:17 – On what’s next and how her team’s findings have a real-world impact. For example, recent findings were included in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in a pending case
32:16 – Resources that the American Cancer Society provides to help cancer survivors
32:53 – Advice she has for cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers
Collaboration is critical to cancer research, but it’s not easy. Matt Bochman and Seth Herzon teamed up on a project focused on a particularly dangerous type of DNA damage. They talked about the keys to a successful scientific collaboration and how to overcome some of the common challenges.
Their collaboration actually started in TheoryLab. That’s the American Cancer Society’s research podcast, but it’s also the name of the American Cancer Society’s online research community for scientists and clinical professionals who have a current or previous relationship with ACS as a grant recipient, mentor, peer reviewer, staff researcher, or adviser.
This year the American Cancer Society partnered with Emerson Collective to support collaborative research projects between scientists in this online community. TheoryLab Collaborative (TLC) Grants are designed to support new and transdisciplinary collaborations among TheoryLab users to explore high-risk ideas, including Covid-19 research relevant to cancer or persons living with cancer.
Seth Herzon, PhD, is Professor of Chemistry at Yale University and a two-time recipient of American Cancer Society research grants. Matt Bochman, PhD, is Associate Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry at Indiana University and is a three-time American Cancer Society grantee.
4:37 – How Dr. Bochman knew he needed to collaborate with a chemist to pursue his research question…
5:47 – …and how he used the American Cancer Society’s online grantee community to connect with Dr. Herzon for the first time
7:33 – Dr. Herzon on what he initially found interesting in the potential collaboration
10:32 – Science communication skills that Dr. Bochman leaned on to get the collaboration going
12:45 – Unexpected benefits that they have seen from the collaboration, such as how it’s encouraged their students and lab members to think more broadly about their work
17:08 – Advice they’d have for finding a scientific collaborator in an online forum
19:05 – The challenges of collaborating with scientists who are much more senior
20:42 – Some of the dos and don’ts of scientific collaboration
24:37 – On how ACS funding has impacted Dr. Bochman’s research
25:55 – A message Dr. Herzon would like to share with cancer patients and caregivers.
There might never have been a time when more people have been interested in learning about science—from a safe distance.
Skype a Scientist matches up scientists with classrooms and groups of adults for Q&A sessions over video chat.
Sarah McAnulty, PhD—Executive Director of Skype a Scientist and a squid biologist—joined the podcast to talk about the goals of Skype a Scientist and how scientists from all disciplines share their work with groups of all ages and backgrounds.
People interested in learning from a scientist—and scientists interested in sharing their work with the public—can sign up to find a match at https://www.skypeascientist.com/.
3:05 – Her research into how animals and bacteria communicate…
4:39 - …and why this matters. Why is it important to know this?
6:33 – On how Skype a Scientist connects people with scientists and helps them overcome the “intimidation factor” with science
8:22 – On how scientists across all disciplines participate
9:41 – On the audience, which is five or more people and could be of any age, background, or level of expertise (e.g., classrooms, library groups)
11:38 – How do you find the right scientist through Skype a Scientist?
14:27 – On how scientists interested in sharing their expertise can get involved
16:35 – Some of her favorite moments from Skype a Scientist sessions
19:23 – On resources available through Skype a Scientist that might be helpful to cancer patients and caregivers
Not all cancer survivors are the same. They have disparate healthcare needs and should not be approached in a “one size fits all” manner.
Corinne Leach, PhD, MPH, MS—Senior Principal Scientist in the American Cancer Society’s Population Science team—explains why and how we should bring personalized follow-up survivorship care to everyone with a history of cancer that is at an appropriate level based on need, that is high quality and equitable, that is efficient and sustainable for the healthcare system, and that leads to positive outcomes for all individuals with a history of cancer.
Dr. Leach also helped develop Springboard Beyond Cancer (https://survivorship.cancer.gov/), an online tool for cancer survivors developed through a collaboration between the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute. Springboard Beyond Cancer is designed to make it easy for those in treatment and post-treatment to access essential information to help them manage ongoing cancer-related symptoms, deal with stress, improve healthy behaviors, communicate better with healthcare teams, and seek support from friends and family.
3:14 – How the very different experiences of her grandparents helped lead to her interest in research into older cancer survivors
7:39 – Characteristics that make older cancer survivors unique
10:13 – On health behaviors that are particularly important for this population
14:14 – On the importance of personalized survivorship
18:26 – On some of the big picture research priorities and specific research questions that were identified in a recent study she led summarizing an expert panel’s research priorities for advancing personalized survivorship in the United States
22:35 – On Springboard Beyond Cancer (https://survivorship.cancer.gov/), a comprehensive tool for both survivors going thorough treatment and those who are post-treatment
25:58 – On how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted personalized cancer survivorship
28:51 – On how the rise in social isolation due to the pandemic could help people appreciate a problem older adults have been dealing with for a long time
Cancer patients undergoing treatment often need urgent medical care, because they become sick from the cancer and/or the cancer treatment. They might be experiencing pain or gastrointestinal issues. They might have a high fever. In these cases, many patients visit an emergency room, and there can be downsides to that.
Arthur Hong, MD, recently received American Cancer Society funding to explore whether outpatient cancer urgent care clinics could be a better alternative to emergency rooms in some cases. Dr. Hong notes: “Cancer urgent care clinics are designed to handle many problems that are commonly the result of cancer and its treatment such as nausea, vomiting, weakness, fevers, and pain. Cancer urgent care visits are usually much more convenient, have shorter waiting times, and are faster and much less expensive than the emergency room.”
Arthur Hong, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Population and Data Sciences at UT Southwestern.
4:42 – On what it’s like to find out in a phone call that your grant has been funded (Dr. Hong was recently awarded a Clinician Scientist Development Grant from the ACS)
6:11 – How the pandemic has impacted his clinical practice and research program
9:24 – Why cancer patients visit the emergency room and…
11:46 – …some of the downsides to them visiting ER for treatment
15:19 – What are cancer urgent care clinics? How common are they?
20:36 – On the advantages of cancer urgent care clinics as an alternative to the emergency room
26:22 – The best-case scenario for how his work unfolds over the next 5 years
28:50 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors and caregivers
It started with a tweet, and in less than a month scientists, clinicians, and patients from over 100 centers in the United States and Canada came together to learn about the impact of COVID-19 on cancer patients.
The COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium was formed to “collect granular, uniformly organized information to stimulate translational science and also to arm our treating providers with the most comprehensive and scientifically accurate evidence as rapidly as possible on cancer patients affected with the virus.”
It has already paid dividends. The consortium has already published evidence in a new paper in Lancet titled, “Clinical impact of COVID-19 on patients with cancer: a cohort study.”
One of the principal authors of that paper joined us to discuss the work of the consortium.
Dimpy Shah, PhD—an American Cancer Society research grantee and Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Mays Cancer Center, home to UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson—is a founding member of the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium and serves on its steering committee, where she provides support, guidance, oversight of progress, and strategic future directions for the consortium.
4:20 – Why the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium was formed and what they hope to accomplish.
6:58 – On the first evidence published by the consortium: “Clinical impact of COVID-19 on patients with cancer: a cohort study.”
10:32 – How this global collaboration between different centers, community partners, and academic centers started with one tweet
15:03 – The mechanics (and magnitude) of the collaboration
17:17 – Early findings from the consortium that have benefited providers
21:19 – How the study could help develop strategies to decrease COVID-19-related risks for cancer patients
24:18 – How her current American Cancer Society-funded grant—which is focused on identifying cancer patients at higher risk of developing viral pneumonia following stem cell transplant—impacted her understanding of COVID-19 in cancer patients
26:44 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients and caregivers
Melissa Bates, PhD, describes the “fascinating twist of going from observation to molecular and cellular manipulation in the lab to a clinical setting” as she and her team uncover exciting links between sleep apnea and multiple myeloma.
Dr. Bates is Assistant Professor of Health and Human Physiology and Pediatric Neonatology and Director of the Leukemia Molecular Epidemiological Resource at the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Iowa.
2:51 – How she and her research team are dealing with the pandemic
4:32 – On sleep-disordered breathing and sleep apnea…
6:46 – …and how it relates to cancer risk and mortality
13:17 – On how she began researching multiple myeloma and why it’s so difficult to treat
17:30 – The link between obesity and both multiple myeloma and sleep-disordered breathing
20:09 – How experiments by Dr. Bates and her lab yielded exciting links between sleep apnea and multiple myeloma
23:11 – How 90% of patients with multiple myeloma had sleep apnea
25:12 – The potential of sleep-disordered breathing as a therapeutic target for multiple myeloma and other cancers
26:44 – The impact of ACS funding on her career
28:28 – Her message for cancer patients and caregivers
How will COVID-19 impact cancer risk and survivorship?
The American Cancer Society is inviting participants in its ongoing Cancer Prevention Study-3 (CPS-3) to use a new app to help investigators track the COVID-19 epidemic and inform future research efforts.
Dr. Alpa Patel explains that understanding how COVID-19 infection is affecting patients—in combination with all the other data that she and her team are collecting through CPS-3 on an ongoing basis—will help answer some very important questions about the impact of COVID-19 on cancer risk and survivorship.
Alpa Patel, PhD, is Sr. Scientific Director of Epidemiology Research and the Principal Investigator of Cancer Prevention Study-3 at the American Cancer Society.
The app, the COVID Symptom Tracker (https://covid.joinzoe.com/us), was created by doctors and scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, King's College London, and Stanford University School of Medicine, working in partnership with the health science company ZOE. Participants simply download the app and each day, track whether they are feeling any symptoms.
3:05 – On the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Prevention Study-3, or CPS-3
4:38 – How CPS-3 participants stay involved during the life of the study
6:06 – What makes CPS-3 such a valuable resource?
8:00 – How and when results from CPS-3 are shared with the scientific and cancer community
9:48 – On what CPS-3 can tell us about physical activity and cancer risk
13:05 – On the addition of the COVID-19 Symptom Tracker app to CPS-3
15:40 – How information from the app in combination of data from CPS-3 could be used to help cancer patients
18:31 – Some of the exciting ways that data from the app could be integrated from information collected through CPS-3, and how that could help cancer patients
21:58 – When data from the COVID-19 Symptom Tracker app might be ready to share
23:01 – What she’s most excited about in terms of the potential impact of CPS-3
25:21 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients and caregivers
Two guests joined the TheoryLab podcast for this episode.
Dr. Terry Badger is a nurse scientist whose research helps cancer survivors and their caregivers to reduce psychological distress and manage cancer symptoms during and after cancer treatment. She talked about how she has helped remove barriers to receiving supportive care services by using the telephone to provide health education and counseling.
Then, Dr. Beverly Zavaleta—a physician, cancer survivor, and author—talked about her experience going through treatment and about her book, Braving Chemo.
For information and resources to help cancer patients, their families, and caregivers cope with cancer and the coronavirus, visit https://www.cancer.org/.
1:30 – Terry Badger, PhD, RN, PMHCNS-BC, FAPOS, FAAN, is an American Cancer Society grantee, an advanced practice psychiatric mental health nurse, and Professor of Nursing, Psychiatry, and Public Health at the University of Arizona, where she is Chair of the Community and Systems Health Science Division.
2:45 – On how common it is for cancer patients to experience psychological distress and what to do about it
5:13 – On interventions she’s developed to deliver supportive care over the phone
7:36 – How lessons from her experience with telehealth are helpful during the pandemic
11:24 – On the impact ACS funding has had on her research
13:10 – Her message for cancer patients and caregivers
14:25 – To participate in Dr. Badger’s research to help survivors and caregivers manage their symptoms, call 866-218-6641
15:08 – Beverly Zavaleta, MD, physician, cancer survivor, and author
16:35 – On being diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer
18:27 – On what it’s like to be a physician diagnosed with cancer
20:53 – Lessons she learned from going through cancer treatment
25:00 – Her motivation for writing Braving Chemo and how she hopes it can help cancer patients and caregivers
David Sabatini, MD, PhD, is an American Cancer Society Research Professor, a Member of the Whitehead Institute, and Professor of Biology at MIT. In 2020, he was co-recipient of the prestigious Sjöberg Prize—which promotes scientific research on cancer, health, and the environment—for discovering the mTOR protein and its role in controlling cell metabolism and growth.
1:55 – How his research lab has been impacted by the pandemic
3:04 – The history of how TOR was discovered, going back to a soil sample from Easter Island
5:25 – How mTOR is kind of like the general contractor for the cell (“Well, we need more proteins, we need more lipids, we need more mitochondria…”)
6:34 – If mTOR is the “general contractor,” then what is it building? And what are the signals that tell it to make things?
8:27 – “…80% of cancers have to find a way to turn on mTOR…”
14:34 – Why inhibiting mTOR to treat cancer isn’t such a straightforward proposition
18:50 – Research tools that he and his team have developed; for example, one of his students developed the first CRISPR libraries and some of the original CRISPR screening technologies
25:39 – On “molecular nutrition” and research into how diet affects you at the molecular level
27:24 – How ACS funding has impacted his work
30:12 – His message for cancer patients and caregivers
A healthy diet, weight control, and a physically active lifestyle are important for everybody, but especially for cancer survivors, who are at higher risk for recurrence as well as second malignancies, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and functional decline.
Nutrition scientist, Wendy Demark-Wahnefried, PhD, RD, has made significant advances designing and implementing home-based diet and exercise interventions for cancer survivors. Her team created a website, https://survivorshine.org/, that helps cancer survivors reach and maintain a healthy weight through diet and exercise. And she’s recruiting cancer survivors living in the Southeastern United States to participate in AMPLIFY, a research study that will help find out the benefits of a healthy eating and exercise program.
Wendy Demark-Wahnefried, PhD, RD, is an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor. She’s also Professor of Nutrition Sciences and Associate Director for Cancer Prevention and Control at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Her team is actively recruiting for a web-based clinical trial to improve diet & exercise health behaviors of cancer survivors: AMPLIFY@uabmc.edu or 1-833-535-7934 (https://amplifymyhealth.org/info).
2:22 - On how COVID-19 is affecting her work
3:33 – Her breakthrough research in the early 1990s into why women that received adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer gained weight
7:05 – On sarcopenic obesity and the challenges and risks it poses for cancer survivors
9:14 – How her team has carved out a niche delivering home-based and web-based interventions to cancer survivors (as opposed to asking them to come to a clinic)
11:36 – The RENEW trial, an intervention where participants were mailed personalized diet and exercise plans and received telephone counseling from a health coach
16:05 – SurvivorSHINE.org, a website her team developed where cancer survivors can receive “personalized information and tools to help them reach and maintain a healthy weight through healthy eating and exercise”
18:45 – On why it’s so important for interventions to be scalable and to meet people where they are – their home
21:49 – With people across the United States sheltering in place, what cancer survivors can do right now, from their homes, to positively impact their physical well-being
24:20 – How ACS funding has impacted her research
90% of cancer deaths are caused by metastasis.
What is metastasis? Why are metastatic cancer cells so hard to target? Are they different than the cancer cells in the primary tumor? What opportunities for treatment are there?
To answer these questions we spoke with former American Cancer Society grantee Karuna Ganesh, MD, PhD, a physician scientist and Assistant Member at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Dr. Ganesh is a GI medical oncologist who runs a lab that’s trying to understand what it is about metastatic cancer cells that make them so deadly and how we can target them.
1:20 – A simple, clear explanation of what metastasis is
2:31 – Why would cancer cells leave their neighbors and seek alternative housing? Moving is stressful; why not just stay put?
5:14 – On why the concept of “wound healing” is so important in cancer research
9:30 – How metastasis is wound healing gone wrong—cellular processes used in a good way for wound healing could be used in a bad way in metastasis
14:56 - Are the cancer cells that metastasize the ‘same’ in their new location as they were in their old one?
18:23 – What are targeted therapies?
20:14 – If cancer cells that ‘move’ and cancer cells that ‘stay’ are different, how might we use targeted therapies to treat metastatic disease?
21:21 – Why she’s so excited about the state of the field
23:11 – The impact of ACS funding on her career
24:49 – Her message for cancer patients and caregivers
Working with community partners largely in faith-based communities, Cheryl Knott, PhD, and Nate Woodard are trying to increase the early detection of breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer.
With the support of American Cancer Society funding, their team trains church members to become community health advisers who deliver cancer early detection workshops in African American Churches.
Cheryl L. Knott, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health in the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Nate Woodard is a doctoral student and graduate research assistant in Dr. Knott’s lab.
3:52 – The Community Health Awareness, Messaging and Prevention (CHAMP) program
6:07 – The role played by African American churches in cancer health promotion
8:35 – On training church members to serve as community health advisors and present evidence-based cancer educational workshops
11:34 – The impact of these workshops
13:51 – The upside and downside of virtual training to compensate for the impossibility of face-to-face workshops during the pandemic
20:15 – The challenge of scalability, given the importance of building relationships at a local level
22:24 – How to weigh cancer prevention needs and recommendations during a pandemic
28:32 – Their message for cancer patients and caregivers
Cancer hasn’t stopped during this pandemic and neither has the National Cancer Institute or American Cancer Society.
Ned Sharpless, MD, director of the National Cancer Institute, joined the TheoryLab podcast to talk about how we can sustain research momentum during the pandemic, what new research opportunities have arisen, and how clinical trials have been impacted.
2:57 – How his job has changed as a result of the coronavirus, and new tasks taken on by the NCI
5:09 – How we can sustain research momentum in the fight against cancer during this pandemic
8:57 – On why data sharing among scientists, always an NCI priority, has become even more important
11:02 – Several interesting cancer research opportunities that have arisen as a result of COVID-19
14:23 – How the pandemic has impacted clinical trials for cancer patients
19:48 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients and their loved ones
What do we know about how tobacco use affects risk and outcomes for coronavirus patients? Jeff Drope, PhD—the American Cancer Society’s Scientific Vice President of Economic and Health Policy Research—explains what we know, what we don’t know, and what we recommend. (2:10)
Then Dr. Drope takes us through a fascinating look at how tobacco farming impacts the developing world. How is global tobacco farming changing? What is daily life like for the tobacco growers in developing countries? How does the tobacco industry incentivize farmers and governments, and what other options do the latter have? (9:25)
Finally, Alex Liber (Senior Scientist on the Society’s Economic and Health Policy Research team) joins us to describe his new paper showing that JUUL sales recovered within weeks following a dip after the company withdrew some flavored products from stores, eventually surpassing sales from before the change as consumption shifted to the menthol/mint and tobacco flavors that remained on shelves. (41:12)
How do vaccines work? What are the challenges and opportunities around developing vaccines against cancers not caused by viruses, such as breast cancer and colorectal cancer? How can we harness all of our technology and understanding to create a vaccine for COVID-19?
Nora Disis, MD, has made truly seminal contributions to our understanding of vaccines for cancer, and she helped us understand what needs to happen for effective cancer and COVID-19 vaccines to be developed.
Dr. Disis is Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean at the University of Washington, and she’s an American Cancer Society Research Professor.
5:18 – On how she is holding up and how she and other researchers are helping out their clinical colleagues
6:37 – How her research has been impacted by the pandemic
8:55 – “We have a lot of projects and we’ve been going at breakneck speed, generating data and generating data…sometimes it’s good to slow down and think about your data rather than jumping on to your next experiment.”
11:45 – How does a vaccine against, for example, the measles work?
16:42 – How vaccines against cancer are different and what challenges are involved in this space
20:18 – The biggest question when developing a vaccine against common cancers not caused by viruses
25:01 – Are there some cancers that are better candidates for a vaccine?
29:30 – On where her team is in the colorectal cancer vaccine space
36:11 – What needs to happen for an effective COVID-19 vaccine to be developed?
42:14 – The impact of ACS funding on her research
45:42 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients and caregivers
Dr. Len Lichtenfeld on the COVID-19 epidemic's effect on cancer research and treatment moving forward.
How is cancer research being affected by COVID-19? Susanna Greer, PhD—Scientific Director, Clinical Cancer Research and Immunology, at the American Cancer Society—describes conversations she’s had with ACS grantees across the country about how the pandemic has affected their research and their labs.
Then we were joined (11:16) by Anthony Leung, PhD, an American Cancer Society grantee and an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr. Leung’s research focuses on how gene regulation impacts diseases such as cancer and virus infection. His work has never been so timely, and in this conversation he helps us understand why RNA is so important, what can happen when RNA regulation goes wrong, and how a deeper understanding of RNA could be critical to fighting cancer and COVID-19.
For information and resources about cancer and COVID-19, please visit cancer.org/coronavirus.
11:16 – How the research community has been impacted
15:07 – How the members of his research lab are supporting each other
18:35 – What is RNA? A really helpful analogy to help us understand why it’s so important.
21:18 – How a deeper understanding of RNA is so important to developing treatments against cancer and COVID-19
26:14 – How RNA regulation changes in stressed cells. One thing that cancer cells and cells infected by a virus such as COVID-19 have in common is that they are stressed.
29:30 – A particularly important way that protein is modified, and what that matters in cancer and COVID-19
31:58 –PARP inhibitors are currently approved by the FDA to treat multiple cancers. How do these drugs work? In which cancer types are they used?
35:30 – How the protein modification that his lab studies is important, not just in cancer, but also in coronavirus infection.
40:31 – A message he’d like to share with cancer survivors
Photo credit: Harry Giglio/Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Also pictured: Judy Ochs
The American Cancer Society's acting COO, Kris Kim, describes how ACS is continuing to help cancer patients and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She also announced a new initiative: The American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge COVID-19 Response Fund.
This fund will help the Society use Hope Lodges to provide health care workers (such as doctors, nurses, and first responders) with rest, comfort, and care during the pandemic.
Visit http://cancer.org/coronavirus for more details.
3:21 – What it’s like living in New York City right now
6:36 – Ways she has seen the spirit of the American Cancer Society coming through during the pandemic
9:33 – The American Cancer Society’s COVID-19 Response Hope Lodge Emergency Operations Fund
12:29 – Why Hope Lodges are so important to cancer patients and caregivers, and why the risk of coronavirus entering Hope Lodges led ACS to make difficult decisions
17:54 – How ACS has been impacted by COVID-19, and how ACS is getting creative to confront some of these challenges
20:51 – How the ACS Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN) has engaged during the pandemic to protect vulnerable populations
24:45 – A message for cancer researchers
27:29 – What ACS supporters can do to keep up the fight during the pandemic
29:42 – What she hopes cancer survivors and caregivers can take away from this conversation
R. Sean Morrison, MD, is a leading voice in geriatric medicine and a pioneering palliative care researcher. He joined the TheoryLab podcast to talk about the steps Mount Sinai Hospital is taking to help patients and what we can all do to lower risk for cancer patients and older adults. He also emphasized the importance of doing things every day to lift our spirits and provide each other with social support.
R. Sean Morrison, MD, is an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor. He is the Ellen and Howard C. Katz Professor and Chair for the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is also the Director of the Lilian and Benjamin Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute and the National Palliative Care Research Center.
2:27 – What he would say to people who think coverage of COVID-19 has been overblown and exaggerated
3:40 – How Mt. Sinai Hospital has reorganized to confront the pandemic
5:25 – The two subsets of people who appear to be at higher risk for complications from COVID-19 infection
8:44 – What we can all do to reduce risk
11:20 – What patients living with cancer should do
13:09 – On the importance of keeping your anxiety and worry at a manageable level
15:53 – How older adults can maintain social support during this time
20:50 – Where older adults should turn to for up-to-date information
22:45 – What we can all do to make things safer for cancer patients and survivors
Len Lichtenfeld, M.D., MACP, American Cancer Society deputy chief medical officer, reviews the week's events as coronavirus gets real in the U.S.
What does COVID-19 mean for cancer patients and caregivers? How can they lower their risk of infection? How can everyone help reduce risk for this vulnerable population? What should cancer patients do if they are undergoing treatment?
Len Lichtenfeld, MD, MACP, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the American Cancer Society, provides important guidance and perspective.
2:26 – The need for people, and particularly those with cancer, to find reliable sources of information
3:51 – How there is much we don’t yet know about how COVID-19 affects cancer patients
5:20 – Why the mortality rate for cancer patients with COVID-19 is higher than it is for other groups
7:22 – How cancer patients can mitigate risk
8:39 – “Never has there been a time when my health, or your health, depends so much on others around us doing the right thing.”
10:35 – Why we all have a responsibility to help “flatten the curve”
13:16 – Should cancer patients give up social activities like dinner with friends?
17:12 – What does this epidemic mean for cancer patients currently undergoing treatment?
22:24 – The most important thing for us all to hold onto in the time ahead
Tom Lynch, MD, is president and director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
A former American Cancer Society grantee, Dr. Lynch is a physician scientist who has taken care of thousands of lung cancer patients and helped conduct translational research that has changed the field. Early in his career he was part of a transdisciplinary research team that discovered how targeted therapies could help lung cancer patients with mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene.
Dr. Lynch was most recently chief scientific officer of Bristol-Myers Squibb. Previously he was CEO of Massachusetts General Physicians Organization, director of Yale Cancer Center, physician-in-chief at Yale’s Smilow Cancer Hospital, chief of hematology-oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
0:53 – What he enjoys most about his new job
1:52 – The very important role of fundamental, basic science and the promise of transdisciplinary research
4:28 – Two cancer research breakthroughs in recent years that stand out: the advent of immunotherapy and the ability to sequence genes for patients
7:42 – Advice for an academic seeking to partner with biotech to translate research into the clinic? How can the gap between industry and academia be bridged?
11:00 – Advice for young scientists trying to take the next step in their career
13:20 – His scientific hero
13:35 – His favorite teacher growing up
14:35 – Most exhilarating moment of his scientific career
17:32 – Most important part of his daily routine
18:23 – The need to change how science is taught in universities
21:50 – A message for cancer patients and caregivers
Yousuf Zafar, MD, MHS, is a physician scientist whose research is focused on the cost of cancer care, specifically the patient-level impact of the cost of cancer care and what he calls financial toxicity:
“Any time a patient experiences costs related to his/her cancer care, whether that’s a cost of drug, a co-pay, time off work, parking, or any of the multitude of costs that our patients face—any time those costs result in harm to the patient—that in my mind is the financial toxicity of cancer care.”
Yousuf Zafar, MD, MHS, is Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke Cancer Institute. He’s also a practicing oncologist who treats patients with GI cancers.
2:22 - What is financial toxicity?
3:58 – What he means by, “We must make the invisible, visible.”
7:36 – How the Affordable Care Act impacted the financial toxicity of cancer
11:00 – On the very important findings from the “natural experiment” that’s happened with Medicaid eligibility expansion: “37 states have passed Medicaid expansion, increasing the eligibility threshold allowing more people to get coverage, while remaining states have not.”
15:02 – What’s next? What are the next questions researchers need to investigate in this area?
17:10 – How can we get together as a community to impact patient care?
21:33 – On the impact of ACS funding on his career
23:07 – His message for cancer patients and caregivers
For people who have had certain cancers or certain patterns of cancer in their family, genetic testing and counseling can be a lifesaver.
Heather Hampel, a Professor and genetic counselor at The Ohio State University’s Comprehensive Cancer Center, explains how genetic testing can help prevent cancer and personalize treatments for cancer patients.
She talks about her research into breast cancer health equity, which is funded by the American Cancer Society, and about Lynch Syndrome, which increases risk for several types of cancer that are preventable if you know you have Lynch Syndrome.
She also describes some of the red flags that indicate someone should seek cancer genetic counseling; she encourages such individuals to visit www.findageneticcounselor.com.
You can learn more about genetic testing and counseling on the American Cancer Society’s website: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/genetics/understanding-genetic-testing-for-cancer.html
2:45 -What is a genetic counselor?
3:34 - How can genetic counselors help someone who has had a cancer diagnosis
9:02 – The importance of HR3235: the 2019 Access to Genetics Counselor Services Act “What this bill would do…is it actually would make genetic counselors recognized providers for Medicare.”
11:44 – On her research into Lynch Syndrome, which increases risk for several types of cancer that are preventable if you know you have Lynch Syndrome.
“We think 1 out of every 279 individuals has Lynch Syndrome, yet 95% of individuals with Lynch Syndrome are not aware of their diagnosis.”
16:57 – On cascade testing, when genetic testing is given to at-risk relatives of someone with a hereditary condition
20:33 – How genetic testing can sometimes help personalize your cancer treatment
23:27 – Her new American Cancer Society-funded research project, “Turning the Page on Breast Cancer”
27:12 – Some of the red flags that indicate someone should seek cancer genetic counseling
Dr. Anees Chagpar has made a difference in the lives of so many patients and families, not only as a breast cancer surgeon, but also through her research. Her groundbreaking study proved that removing just a little more healthy tissue during surgery cut the need for patients to have a second surgery in half.
In this interview she spoke at length about that study—including the rationale behind it, its innovative design, and how it was shown to work in different hospitals—and she also talked about the special relationship she has with her patients.
Anees Chagpar, MD, MBA, MPH, FACS, FRCS(C), is a breast surgical oncologist and full Professor in the Department of Surgery at Yale School of Medicine.
2:57 – What motivated her to be a breast cancer surgeon?
4:51 – The special relationship that she has with her patients
6:55 – How breast cancer surgery has changed over the years
12:36 – On her groundbreaking study showing that taking just a little bit more healthy tissue initially can help breast cancer patients avoid a return trip to the operating room
28:25 – How will other surgeons find out about these practice-changing findings?
30:34 – On the massive open online class (MOOC) she teaches at Yale called “Introduction to Breast Cancer.” Who takes this class? Why is teaching this course important to her? https://www.coursera.org/learn/breast-cancer-causes-prevention
32:58 – What she would like cancer patients and caregivers to know
Sarah Gollust’s research focuses on how scientific evidence is translated to the public, and how that process can shape public opinion, health policy, and patient decision making.
She has applied her work to public health issues such as vaccines, mammograms, health disparities, and the Affordable Care Act. Her research also “yields insight into how communication to the public and policymakers can be more effective.”
Sarah Gollust, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Division of Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota.
3:26 – On some of the changes we’ve seen in health communication over the past decade
5:57 – Two ways the media can affect health-related outcomes or decisions
11:25 – On how the news media has covered recommendations on mammograms
“We’re trying to better understand how references to competing messaging in the news media environment might affect downstream women’s health attitudes and beliefs and ultimately behaviors.”
16:17 – How women’s attitudes about mammograms were affected by the news media
25:00 – How can scientists better engage with the media and the public?
30:40 – Challenges that journalists face in todays environment, and how scientists can help
34:37 – Helpful advice on how scientists can get better at disseminating their work and translating it to the public and scientific community
38:10 – How ACS funding impacted her research and allowed her to mentor younger scientists
40:05 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients and caregivers
American Cancer Society scientists project that approximately 33,330 men will die from prostate cancer in America in 2020. The majority of these deaths are due to the development of advanced stage castration-resistant disease, which typically progresses to bone metastatic prostate cancer.
In this conversation, two-time American Cancer Society grantee Leah Cook, PhD, talks us through the problem of bone metastatic prostate cancer. Why is it so hard to treat? What is happening inside the bones? And why is she excited about recent discoveries made in her lab?
Leah Cook, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Microbiology at the Univ. of Nebraska Medical Center.
3:36 - Where in the body does prostate cancer most frequently go when it moves?
4:49 – How many men with prostate cancer will experience bone metastatic disease?
5:52 – On how bone metastatic prostate cancer is treated
8:30 – On what happens to bones when prostate cancer cells invade
10:32 – On why immune cells are present in bone cells
12:11 – On how her lab is trying to understand what happens to immune cells in bones that have been invaded by prostate cancer
13:52 – Why don’t immune cells in the bone recognize and kill bone metastatic prostate cancer cells?
19:23 – How could the work of her lab change how we treat metastatic prostate cancer?
21:48 – What she’s most excited about in her research
23:42 – The role of ACS funding in her career
25:11 – A message she’d like to share with cancer survivors and caregivers
27:32 – On health equity issues in metastatic prostate cancer, especially among African American men
Oncolytic viruses are cancer-killing viruses engineered to target and replicate in cancer cells and leave normal cells unharmed. They can also alert the immune system to attack the cancer cells.
Susanne Warner, MD, is conducting research around a novel cancer-killing virus that can attack tumors in three different ways: by infecting tumor cells, by shutting down blood supply to the tumor, and by training a patient’s immune system to attack the tumor.
Dr. Warner is also a surgical oncologist, and she has a deep interest in patient care that goes beyond the operating room – she talks at length about helping patients through their emotional and spiritual journey.
Susanne Warner, MD, is Assistant Professor in the Division of Surgical Oncology and Department of Surgery at City of Hope.
2:07 – What is an oncolytic virus?
3:09 – How do they find cancer cells and how do they kill them?
7:17 – How do you make an oncolytic virus in the lab?
8:53 – One of the ongoing debates in the scientific community about oncolytic viruses
“The ideal oncolytic viruses in our opinion are potent, quickly dividing and then what we call immunogenic. And that means that the type of tumor cell destruction that they cause makes a splash, essentially, and gets the attention of the immune system so that it can mount an anti-viral response, which then is also a robust anti-tumor response if enough of those tumor cells have been destroyed and revealed themselves to the immune system.”
11:41 – Why the immune system doesn’t just respond on its own to cancer, and how oncolytic viral therapy can rip a hole in the “invisibility cloak” that cancer cells wear
14:07 – The promise of clinical therapies combining immunotherapy with oncolytic virus therapy
17:24 – The surgeon-patient relationship and her interest in helping patients in their spiritual and emotional journey
21:55 – Her message for cancer patients and survivors
25:08 – The impact of ACS funding on her career
A physician-scientist and thought leader whose research has helped change the clinical care of leukemia patients, Kevin Shannon, MD, continues to shape the field.
In this conversation, Dr. Shannon takes us through the challenges and hopes of leukemia research and describes what has him most excited about the state of cancer research.
Kevin Shannon, MD, is Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, where he holds the Roma and Marvin Auerback Distinguished Professorship of Molecular Oncology. For his seminal research accomplishments, Dr. Shannon was named an American Cancer Society Research Professor.
2:09 – What are leukemias?
4:37 – What people should know about the state of leukemia research: “Leukemia has been one of the diseases where we’ve been able to apply the principle of understanding the underlying molecular basis of the disease to developing better treatments, and then implementing those treatments in the clinic.”
7:13 – How he decides which mutations in the DNA are the most important to study
9:53 – The difference between a DNA mutation and chromosomal abnormality, the problems they cause, and how they can even occur together
16:06 – What it means to say something is “druggable.”
18:36 – How leukemias become resistant to treatment
21:48 – How do you treat a disease that’s constantly changing?
25:12 – How his research provides insight into some of the broader questions in cancer research, beyond leukemia
27:56 – What excites him most about the state of cancer research today
32:19 – The impact of American Cancer Society funding on his career
36:35 – The outsize value of Institutional Research Grants, small pilot awards that the American Cancer Society awards to organizations such as the University of California at San Francisco
39:25 – His thoughts on the partnership between the American Cancer Society and St. Baldrick’s Foundation “to raise $11 million to fund the most innovative biological and clinical laboratory studies that have the greatest potential to quickly deliver new and improved treatments for kids with cancer.” (http://pressroom.cancer.org/StBaldricks2019)
42:26 – A message for cancer patients and caregivers
Lipids are fat molecules normally found in the membranes that surround each cell in the body. They also play a critical role in cellular communication. Ray Blind, PhD, and his lab have been investigating how a particular lipid turns cancer genes on and off in glioblastoma. In this interview he talks about how this happens as well as the very exciting therapeutic potential of his work.
Ray Blind, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
2:57 – Lipids? What are lipids? Why are they important?
9:40 – What does the cutting edge of science tell us what it’s like in the nucleus?
15:28 – A nuclear lipid the Blind Lab studies interacts with chromatin. Why is that interaction important?
18:24 – How this nuclear lipid might be especially important in glioblastoma
21:39 – “You know the lipid is there, you know it has a role in cancer, we also assume that it has a role in normal cell development—is there a way to block it and not impact normal development or function? What would be the therapeutic translation?”
23:58 – “Well, this is what we’re really most excited about…” – chemical genetics, and the therapeutic potential of ongoing work in his lab
30:29 – The impact of ACS funding on his lab and on the direction of his research
34:01 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients
The circadian clock is an internal, 24-hour timekeeping system that’s synchronized with the light-dark cycle, and it’s resident in basically all our cells.
Kristin Eckel-Mahan, PhD, recently discovered an important molecular mechanism linking the circadian clock to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) growth. When her lab “repaired” the broken circadian clock within HCC cells, they were able to cause cell death. Her findings suggest that altering circadian function could provide prevention strategies and even, in the long term, treatment strategies for HCC, which is the most common type of primary liver cancer.
Kristin Eckel-Mahan, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Center for Metabolic and Degenerative Diseases at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
2:15 – On the rise in incidence and mortality rates of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of primary liver cancer
4:03 – Risk factors for HCC
5:24 – The role of fatty liver in increased HCC risk
9:22 – A particularly interesting description of the circadian clock and its importance in health
13:05 – The role of the circadian clock in liver cancer, and how she’s studying a protein’s role in circadian repression
20:34 – Therapeutic prospects related to altering the circadian system and the promise of chronotherapy (treatment of an illness or disorder that takes into account the body's natural rhythms and cycles)
27:52 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients and caregivers
Around a quarter of people who smoke are non-daily smokers (those that smoke on some but not all days), and that number is increasing. The cancer risk of non-daily smoking is significant and existing treatments tend not to be tailored to this population.
To address this issue, Bettina Hoeppner, PhD, an experimental psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, has developed a smartphone app, “Smiling Instead of Smoking,” to support non-daily smokers in quitting smoking. It serves “as a behavioral, in-the-pocket coach and uses positive psychology exercises to enhance quitting success.”
4:00 – What are “non-daily smokers?” Why is this a thing?
5:40 – Health risks of non-daily smoking
6:51 – Populations that are more at risk, and why they may be more likely to be non-daily smokers
9:31 – Barriers to quitting that are unique to non-daily smokers
12:05 – Why she uses a smart phone app in her research to help non-daily smokers quit smoking
14:28 – How her “Smiling Instead of Smoking” app works
18:07 – Why she chose happiness as an approach; how positive psychology is a promising new approach to smoking cessation
22:03 – On positive early returns her team has seen from the app—confidence in quitting increased, urge to smoke decreased, and perceptions of smoking became less positive
25:40 – On the potential to reach vulnerable populations with this app
28:13 – The impact American Cancer Society funding had on her career, taking a chance on funding work that was perceived as high risk
30:03 – A message she’d like to share with cancer survivors and caregivers
Cancer drugs that target “the machinery required for cell division” have been used successfully in clinics for decades. But these drugs have limitations. Many patients develop resistance and the side effects can be severe, because these drugs—in addition to targeting rapidly dividing tumor cells—also kill healthy cells.
Dr. Holland’s lab is searching for vulnerabilities in cell division that are unique to cancer cells. And he is building on some of his findings to develop a novel anti-cancer strategy that allows for the specific killing of proliferating tumor cells without affecting healthy dividing cells.
Andrew Holland, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and the Department of Oncology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He’s also a two-time American Cancer Society grantee. He recently received a Mission Boost Grant, which are designed to support select current and past ACS grantees specifically for the translation of their research to human testing.
2:23 – On what it was like to get the good news about his new Mission Boost Grant and the importance of funding translational research
5:47 – A helpful description of cell division and how it goes wrong in cancer
7:44 – Why drugs that target cell division are effective but have notable limitations
11:06 – A vulnerability around cell division his lab found in a specific type of breast cancer cell in cancer cells and normal cells that could be targeted
13:15 – How his lab’s work could lead to more targeted treatments and reduced side effects for breast cancer patients…
15:05 – …and potentially in other cancer types as well.
16:03 – On the hope that this could be scratching the surface of therapies that target vulnerabilities in the cell division of cancer cells
23:46 – A message for those whose lives have been impacted by cancer.
Cancer cells, explains Dorothy Sipkins, MD, PhD, “have this tendency to steal from or copy the way that normal cells respond to their microenvironment.”
In this conversation Dr. Sipkins explains how cancer cells profit from the tissue microenvironment. She also describes an important discovery made by her lab, showing how acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) cells get around the blood-brain barrier to find the microenvironment in the central nervous system where they flourish.
Dorothy Sipkins, MD, PhD, is an associate professor at the Duke University Medical Center in the Division of Hematological Malignancies and Cellular Therapy. Dr. Sipkins runs a lab that’s focused on tissue microenvironments, or “niches, that regulate the migration, survival and regeneration of cancerous cells.”
3:42 – Why the tissue microenvironment is so important…
8:02 – …and how different microenvironments are crucial for cancer cells
11:55 –The treatment challenges resulting from the movement of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) cells into the central nervous system
16:17 – The long, difficult (but absolutely critical) journey her lab took to understanding how ALL gets around the blood-brain barrier to find the tissue microenvironment that allows it to flourish
30:36 – How her lab is trying to find “the best drug, the best tool, the best way to inhibit this process” in patients
31:07 – How ACS helped advance her research
32:52 – A message she’d like to share with survivors and caregivers
As both a clinician and scientist Kosj Yamoah, MD, PhD, has dedicated his career to increasing access and quality of care for prostate cancer patients, particularly African American men.
In this conversation Dr. Yamoah describes the challenges associated with knowing when prostate cancer is likely to be aggressive. And he talks about the increased incidence and mortality among African American prostate cancer patients, touching on causal factors as well as issues around incidence, diagnosis, treatment delivery, treatment response, and outcomes.
Kosj Yamoah, MD, PhD, is a radiation oncologist and Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute.
1:08 – The biggest challenge clinicians face when treating prostate cancer patients
3:01 – Some of the issues faced by African American prostate cancer patients
5:14 –Disparities and health inequity issues for African American prostate cancer patients
8:25 – On his research into biomarkers for prostate cancer
12:30 – On prospectively validating the effectiveness of Decipher—a genomic test looking at gene expression within tumor tissue to measure its aggressiveness—in African American men
17:06 – His work in West Africa, where “prostate cancer is the 2nd leading cause of cancer death,” as part of the Men of African Descent and Carcinoma of the Prostate (MADCaP) consortium
21:17 – On starting high school at age 7 (!!!)
26:25 – A heartfelt message for cancer survivors and caregivers
“To be a scientist,” notes Steve Morris, MD, “you have to take failure after failure with undying enthusiasm.” Without that persistence, we might never have had the lung cancer drug Crizotinib.
The path to that drug’s development spanned more than two decades, and Dr. Morris played a critical and recurring role.
In 1994, Dr. Morris and his team discovered the gene ALK and showed that it plays a critical role in some lymphomas. He went on to help show that a variety of cancer sub-types are caused by ALK abnormalities, including certain lung cancers, lymphomas, leukemias, mesotheliomas, thyroid cancers, and pediatric cancers.
But he didn’t stop with discovery. He and his team also created a diagnostic test, the Vysis ALK Break Apart FISH Probe Kit, to help clinicians determine if a patient’s tumors have an abnormal ALK gene.
Ultimately his efforts helped drug developers to come up with the lung cancer drug Xalkori (crizotinib), which was first approved by the FDA in 2011 for the treatment of ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer. The drug’s use has been expanded since. Crizotinib is also being evaluated as a potential targeted drug therapy in the treatment of neuroblastoma, a type of brain cancer, and other cancers with ALK mutations or rearrangements. Up to 15% of neuroblastomas have mutations in the ALK gene.
Steve Morris, MD, is the co-founder of Insight Genetics and serves as Chief Medical Officer for companies developing cancer therapies. Prior to that he was a Full Member at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
4:49 – On his team’s “time-consuming, labor-intensive, capital-intensive” discovery of the ALK gene
8:48 – How ALK plays a role in cancer
11:20 – The road to making ALK a druggable target
16:58 – The diagnostic test he and his team developed to help clinicians determine if a patient’s tumors have an abnormal ALK gene
26:19 – On why he left academic medicine to pursue drug development and the creation of diagnostic tests
29:32 – On the challenges of drug development, including the low success rate, the long development timeline, and the very high capital investment
32:52 – On the exciting prospects of precision medicine
38:39 – The role of American Cancer Society funding on his career and the discovery of ALK
As a clinician and researcher, Efren Flores, MD, is dedicated to helping everyone, including the most vulnerable populations, prevent and treat lung cancer. In this conversation, Dr. Flores talks about health equity and disparities, the barriers that patients are faced with, and the importance of coordinated care. He also speaks eloquently about the stigma that some lung cancer patients have to deal with and how, “medical conditions don’t define people. Nobody is defined by cancer.”
Efren Flores, MD, is a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Instructor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School, where he’s the Officer for Community Health and Equity. He’s also a member of the National Lung Cancer Roundtable, a coalition of leading professional, government and non-governmental organizations working to accelerate the nation's efforts to reduce mortality from lung cancer.
4:30 – On health equity and health disparities, the critical issue of missed appointments in radiology, and some of the barriers patients have to overcome
11:32 – What patient outreach looks like in lung cancer
14:42 – How mental health clinicians could be key to advancing lung cancer screening for a hard-to-reach population
16:53 – The importance of coordinated patient care
20:34 – The National Lung Cancer Roundtable and how it can help vulnerable patient populations
25:20 – What he wishes people knew about lung cancer
27:04 – The impact of American Cancer Society funding on his research
28:57 – A message he’d like to share with patients
Dr. Monica Webb Hooper is a leader in the field of cancer health disparities, internationally recognized for her tobacco research. She is Director of the Office of Cancer Disparities Research in the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center at Case Western Reserve University. She is also Professor of Oncology, Family Medicine & Community Health and Psychological Sciences.
3:50 - What are cancer disparities?
6:09 – The listening tour her cancer center underwent to learn more about community health care needs, perceptions, desires, and experiences
8:29 – Tobacco-related health disparities and the unique role that stress has on ethnic and racial disparities
14:14 – Culturally specific interventions for African Americans, how to increase access to these interventions, and the challenges of keeping patients engaged using mobile applications
22:56 – How to find the web-based intervention, “Pathways to Freedom: Leading the Way to a Smoke-Free Community”
23:42 – The mission of the Tobacco Obesity Oncology Laboratory (TOOL)
25:12 – The impact of ACS funding on her work
26:34 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients
As a lung cancer pulmonologist who sees 5-7 new patients every week, runs a patient-focused clinical research program, and has been helping patients fight lung cancer for more than 25 years, Gerard Silvestri, MD, MS, has a long history with this disease. So when he says, “I have never been in my career so optimistic as I am now,” take note.
In this interview Dr. Silvestri talks about reasons for optimism in nearly every aspect of lung cancer research, from prevention and screening to new treatments and survivorship.
Dr. Silvestri is Professor of Medicine and the George C. and Margaret M. Hillenbrand Endowed Chair at the Medical University of South Carolina. He’s also on the steering committee of the National Lung Cancer Roundtable, a coalition of leading professional, government and non-governmental organizations working to accelerate the nation's efforts to reduce mortality from lung cancer.
2:29 – On his work in the clinic and the lab: “Every Tuesday I see between 5 and 7 new patients with lumps and bumps, and my job is to do three things—ask the questions: ‘What is it?’ (that’s the diagnosis); ‘Where is it?’ (that’s the stage); and ‘What can we do about it?’ (those are the treatment options).”
4:21 – What should people know about lung cancer? After noting that, “more women will die of lung cancer than all other female cancers combined,” he shared encouraging news about prevention and screening.
6:36 – On what it means to be a high-risk patient
8:42 – On where high-risk patients should go for screening, and the importance of returning for follow-up screenings: “The where is actually really important…you should be in a place that can really care for you.”
12:11 – On lung cancer in patients who have never smoked
15:09 – On why he’s never been more optimistic about treatment breakthroughs
20:04 – On the work of the National Lung Cancer Roundtable
23:30 – On three aspects of the Roundtable’s work that are particularly exciting
27:51 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients and caregivers
The stark and persistent disparity in breast cancer outcomes between black and white women is a public health dilemma that Vanessa Sheppard, PhD, has dedicated her career to addressing.
Among the many reasons for this disparity is non-adherence to therapy, and in her new American Cancer Society-funded study, Dr. Sheppard has a plan to address that.
In this interview, Dr. Sheppard describes Sisters Informing Sisters, the first communication skills intervention for newly diagnosed black breast cancer patients. Co-created with survivors, it has already shown great potential for improving equity in adherence to treatment in black women.
Vanessa Sheppard, PhD, is Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Associate Director of Disparities Research, and co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at Massey Cancer Center.
2:55 – Important distinction between health equity and health disparities
5:45 – On the many contributing factors to the breast cancer disparities experienced by African American women, including delays from diagnosis to treatment, treatment decisions, and their opportunities to make treatment decisions
11:08 – On the importance of the patient-provider relationship and patient-centered communication: “the broader research has shown that providers communicate differently with patients based on age and race/ethnicity”
16:17 – On the first education intervention for newly diagnosed African American breast cancer patients, Sisters Informing Sisters, which she co-created with survivors
22:07 – On her new American Cancer Society grant, which is funding the first large-scale trial to include culturally targeted adherence interventions for African American women with breast cancer: “This project is a project of my heart…It’s very personal in terms of the women that we’ve engaged to develop this intervention.”
27:40 – A message she’d like to share with cancer patients
Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, or DIPG, is a rare but particularly aggressive and hard-to-treat tumor. Ranjit Bindra MD, PhD, a practicing radiation oncologist at the Yale School of Medicine and Associate Professor of Therapeutic Radiology, is leveraging his translational research and clinical experience to find new ways to treat this cancer.
3:18 – On the use of radiation to treat cancer patients: “…really the most exciting research on the horizon is trying to understand which particular tumors—what types of mutations in the DNA of those tumors—make them more sensitive to treatments that have radiation therapy.”
6:19 – On his research into combining drugs with radiation: “We are very interested in finding tumor mutations—the actual mutations that drive those cancers. We try to find ways to target them with novel drugs so that when we combine them with radiation, it’s sort of a 1-2 punch.”
10:11 – On Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, or DIPG. What is it? What are the current treatments? Why aren’t they working? What is the exciting new finding by his team?
22:09 – On how his lab sees a path towards a clinical trial with DIPG patients
26:43 – On the impact of American Cancer Society funding on his work
28:23 – A message he’d like to share with patients
“Mitosis is not only important from a fundamental point of view to try to understand how the body can develop all the cells that it has and heal its wounds and so forth, but also it represents an entrée into a process that you can attack as a physician trying to block the processes that are fundamental to cancer…I’ve now spent 50 years on mitosis, and I’ve never been bored.”
In a career that has spanned decades, with seminal accomplishments that earned him an American Cancer Society Research Professorship, Richard McIntosh, PhD, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has profoundly impacted our understanding of mitosis.
And now he has written an undergraduate textbook for non-science majors, Understanding Cancer; an Introduction to the Biology, Medicine and Societal Implications of this Disease.
In this conversation he talks about the importance of mitosis, his motivation for writing this new book for students who aren’t necessarily scientists, and his son’s battle with stage 4 lung cancer.
2:14 – On why it’s important for undergraduates who aren’t majoring in science to understand cancer.
7:37 – On the diagnosis of his son, Rob, with stage 4 lung cancer
12:40 – On how understanding the science behind cancer can help friends and families who are supporting patients dealing with cancer
15:19 – What is mitosis? It’s kind of like separating a bowl of tangled up spaghetti noodles into two perfect halves.
19:41 – On how mitosis—or the control of mitosis—differs in cancer cells
21:16 – On the impact of ACS funding, and how he built an infrared laser into (wait for it) a laser trap with which he measured “the forces that microtubules generate as they grow and shrink in a test tube.”
24:25 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients and caregivers
Darren Roblyer and his lab has developed a small, painless wearable probe that a patient can wear over her tumor. It’s flexible and conforms to the shape of the patient’s breast, and it uses light to monitor the tumor’s response to chemotherapy.
Why is this important? It offers a new way to assess treatment response in real time to see if a patient is responding to pre-surgical chemotherapy, providing a pathway to personalize the treatment plan for each patient.
Dr. Roblyer is a two-time American Cancer Society grantee and Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University
2:27 – On why neoadjuvant (or pre-surgical) chemotherapy is important
3:45 – The challenges of pre-surgical chemotherapy
5:34 – An opportunity to adapt treatments for specific patients
7:54 – How his lab uses a wearable probe to monitor breast tumors
10:48 – How the technology can help identify who’s responding to chemotherapy and who’s not in the first week of therapy
12:21 – On why it’s safe and painless, and how the wearable probe will help them study larger patient populations
15:28 – On how, since the probe can be worn by the patient outside the hospital, it allows physicians to monitor treatment responsiveness at useful timepoints
20:03 – On the two aspects of this work he’s most excited about
24:51 – The impact of ACS funding on his work
25:55 – His message for cancer patients
Latina breast cancer survivors tend to be less physically active and experience more comorbidities (such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes) when compared to Caucasian breast cancer survivors. Christina Dieli-Conwright, PhD, is trying to change that.
Her American Cancer Society-funded work is a three-phase exercise intervention involving Latina breast cancer survivors, with the clinical phase of the trial providing the knowledge and motivation needed for them to continue to exercise in a community setting.
1:23 – Christina Dieli-Conwright, PhD, Associate Professor and Clinical Exercise Physiologist at City of Hope National Medical Center
2:41 – On comorbidities, and why she’s focused on Latina breast cancer survivors
6:50 – On the relatively high rates of metabolic dysregulation—which includes metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, and visceral adiposity—in Latina breast cancer survivors
11:14 – On the three phases of her exercise intervention, and results so far
18:14 – Some of the reasons Latinas are underrepresented in clinical trials and research studies
21:15 – On how this program could be expanded to help Latinas who live far from big cancer centers
25:07 – A direction in her research she’s particularly excited about
26:32 – On the impact of American Cancer Society funding on her career
28:50 – A message she’d like to share with cancer survivors and caregivers
You can’t attack cancer from every angle without targeting its metabolism.
As Dr. Heather Christofk puts it, “cancer cells have a very different metabolism in general than most of their normal cell counterparts, and that is because most normal cells that are not dividing mainly want to use their nutrients to acquire energy. But most cancer cells want to use the nutrients they take up to build things. They use them to build more DNA and protein and lipids in order to grow and divide.
“If we could come up with a way to block this altered metabolism found in cancer, we would be able to reduce the growth of the tumor, because this is fundamental—there’s no other way for the tumors to grow.
“The challenge is finding the processes that are required for the tumor but not for normal tissues.”
Heather Christofk, PhD, is Associate Professor of biological chemistry at UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
3:12 – Why is cell metabolism important?
6:30 – How is cell metabolism different in cancer cells?
8:15 – Are the changes to cell metabolism that occur as cancer progresses a side effect of cancer, or are they helping to cause tumor growth?
10:45 – Could targeting cell metabolism help block tumor cell growth?
12:55 – How her lab is using viruses as a guide to identify new cancer metabolism targets.
15:55 – A result that she’s really excited about -- an enzyme involved in fructose metabolism and…
17:00 – …why it was unexpected.
18:15 – The impact of ACS on her career.
22:37 – Why the next 10 years in cancer metabolism research are going to be exciting.
25:00 – On why there’s reason for hope and optimism for cancer patients and their loved ones.
What do you do when things get hard? What resources and experiences do you summon to help see you through a problem? Imagine being a young person, without much experience dealing with adversity, and learning that you have cancer.
Abby Rosenberg, MD, MS, MA, has devoted her career to helping teens and young adults acquire the coping skills they need to manage stress after a cancer diagnosis and boost quality of life beyond treatment.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Rosenberg talks about the challenges faced by young people with cancer and how she and her team are helping them acquire the individual, community, and existential resources needed to address the questions confronted by every cancer patient: “Why is this happening to me? What does this mean for me and my life? How does this change my identity and what I envisioned for my future?”
Dr. Rosenberg is the director of palliative care and resilience research at Seattle Children's Research Institute. She’s also an associate professor in the division of hematology-oncology and the division of bioethics and palliative care at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine.
https://www.seattlechildrens.org/directory/abby-r-rosenberg/ https://twitter.com/abbyrosenbergmd?lang=en
Cancer pain can affect all parts of a patient’s life and can impact their caregivers as well. Tamara Somers, PhD, helps patients develop strategies and skills for pain management to help them cope with their pain.
And it’s not just about helping them increase their quality of life and decrease their stress, as “patients that have less pain may be more likely to adhere to their treatment recommendations or increase overall healthy behaviors, which can improve outcomes.”
But what if a patient lives in a rural area far from a medical center? What if they’ve already missed too much work during treatment or spent too much time away from family? Or they’re in too much pain to travel?
That’s why Dr. Somers is helping to pioneer the use of mobile health technology to deliver these interventions. Her American Cancer Society-funded study was one of the first (if not the first) to use video conferencing to reach patients who may not be able to visit a medical center to receive in-person treatment.
Dr. Somers is a Clinical Psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University.
Cancer treatment can lead to pain and symptoms that pose profound quality of life challenges for patients over the short and long term.
Dr. Barbara Murphy is a medical oncologist who specializes in head and neck cancer, and she’s dedicated her research career to addressing cancer pain and symptom management.
She spoke with the American Cancer Society about:
3:15 – The basics of head and neck cancer 6:10 – Two key preventive strategies: HPV vaccines and preventing young people from starting to smoke 9:15 - How treatment of head and neck cancer has improved 15:40 – Challenges faced by cancer survivors 21:20 – Patients with economic, social and emotional disadvantages
Dr. Murphy is Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where she is also Director of Pain and Symptom Management Oncology Services.
Skin doesn’t just keep your insides on the inside. It’s home to microbes that have a very important role in your health. Could modifying the skin microbiome affect the risk, severity, or onset of skin cancer?
Dr. Julia Oh, an American Cancer Society grantee at Jackson Laboratory, is one of the leading voices in research into the role of the skin microbiome in cancer and other diseases.
She talked about how the skin microbiome impacts cancer risk and progression. And she explained why she believes that, “through the microbiome there will be a new generation of preventative and treatment strategies for managing risk and also for improving treatment response.”
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men (after skin cancer), and while it can often be treated successfully, metastatic disease remains challenging.
Lloyd Trotman, PhD—a former American Cancer Society grantee and Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory—is trying to change that.
He and his team recently developed the first genetic mouse model for the treatment and analysis of metastatic prostate cancer. Now they are seeking to translate their findings into patients to “turn lethal prostate cancer into a curable disease.”*
In this interview he talks about the challenges of metastatic prostate cancer, the exciting discoveries he and his team have made, and how his work is getting closer to patients.
*https://www.cshl.edu/research/faculty-staff/lloyd-trotman/
If every cell in your body has the same DNA, the same 20,000 genes, then why are the cells different? Why are muscle cells different than neurons? The answer is epigenetics—changes in gene activity governed by influences outside the genes themselves.
Bradley Bernstein, MD, PhD, is one of the world’s leading experts on epigenetics and cancer. In this episode he covered a lot of ground, but he used clear examples to help us understand what epigenetics is and why it’s critical to attacking cancer.
3:50 – There’s a copy of your genome in every cell. How do you fit a 6-foot long string of DNA inside a nucleus that’s about 6 microns? Epigenetics!
8:30 – “Cancer has classically been thought of as a genetic disease, but…”
16:20 – On a new technology his team developed that enables them to see which genes are on and which genes are off in individual leukemia cells
19:45 – On how this tool could be used in therapies.
23:45 – On his lab’s progress over the past 15 years, as they’ve moved from studying the genome in yeast to breaking new ground in brain and gastrointestinal tumors
29:20 – On the impact of ACS funding on his lab
30:55 – What would he say to patients and caregivers dealing with cancer?
Dr. Bernstein is an institute member at the Broad Institute and a professor in the Department of Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He co-directs the Broad’s Epigenomics Program. He’s the Bernard and Mildred Kayden Endowed MGH Research Institute Chair. And he’s an American Cancer Society Research Professor.
Ovarian cancer is actually an umbrella term describing a variety of cancers that often originate, not in the ovary, but in the fallopian tube. And that has important implications for the early detection and treatment of cancer.
Dr. Joanna Burdette leads a lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago that integrates “imaging, drug discovery, microfluidics, and basic biology to try and understand how and where ovarian cancers originate.”
4:00 – On profound changes to our understanding of ovarian cancer in recent years and the challenges of early detection
12:20 – On a device she and her collaborators built: a complete 3D model of a female reproductive system that has a 28-day menstrual cycle, facilitating research into cells that respond biologically like they would in the human body
21:30 – On how ACS funding impacted her career
23:45 – Her message for ovarian cancer patients and caregivers
Dr. Burdette is Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Katherine Cook, an assistant professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine, has dedicated her career to exploring the association between obesity and breast cancer risk and outcomes.
Here, she describes work showing that what moms eat can have a long-term impact on the health of daughters that can increase their breast cancer risk.
She also talks about how the timing of weight gain can impact breast cancer risk, how obesity is associated with poorer response to chemotherapy, and how weight loss can lower breast cancer risk.
And she described recent work showing that breast-specific microbiome populations are significantly affected by diet.
Andras Heczey’s research focuses on directing the immune system to attack cancer cells in pediatric patients. He was the first to show that natural killer T cells could be used, once modified, to attack neuroblastoma cells.
Dr. Heczey—assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital—talked about his ongoing clinical trial, the challenges of taking research out of the lab and into the clinic to benefit patients, and what message he would share with cancer patients and their families.
"If you're a cancer patient today, you don't want tomorrow's solutions. You want today's solutions."
That's why Bob Crutchfield is leading the American Cancer Society's efforts to drive the best ideas to market faster, so cancer patients can benefit from less invasive – and more successful – treatments.
Mr. Crutchfield is the Managing Director of BrightEdge, the Philanthropic Impact Fund of the American Cancer Society, which invests in for-profit companies in order to advance the speed of commercial adoption of novel and innovative therapies, diagnostics, devices, and technologies.
Radiation has long been a common treatment for cancer patients, but in recent years, notes Dr. Charlie Benson of Georgia State University, it has been understood that, “besides the direct ability of radiation to kill cancer cells, it also has the ability to actually prime the immune system to recognize things that are different about cancer cells and to better attack and kill these cancer cells.”
In this conversation, Dr. Benson talks about how radiation makes cancer cells better targets for the immune system (7:00). She also explains, given that low-dose radiation can enhance the effectiveness of immunotherapy, what research needs to happen for it to become the standard of care for patients (9:45).
Finally, she talks movingly about being an African American female scientist; what it was like to grow up without seeing examples of minority females in science; and why she visits communities “to give people the image and the idea that there’s no particular way you have to look to be a successful scientist (17:15).”
Most people who die of cancer, die of metastasis. Approximately 90% of cancer deaths are from metastasis. It’s essentially when a tumor cell leaves the place it originally started, goes to another tissue, and builds a new colony.
It’s an incredibly complex process, but two experts in the field have recently published work that brings the problem of metastasis into focus.
Danny Welch, Professor and Associate Director of Education at The University of Kansas Cancer Center, and Doug Hurst, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, scoured the scientific literature—reviewing more than 10,000 publications—and defined the hallmarks of metastasis:
- Motility and invasion
- Modulation of the microenvironment
- Plasticity/adaptability
- The ability to colonize
In this conversation they explained each of the hallmarks and what it all means for cancer patients.
"My lab studies pathways that are involved in drug response. We've gotten very interested in why drugs work and why they don’t work in the context of mainly solid tumors."
So says Dr. Rolf Brekken, the Effie Marie Cain Scholar in Angiogenesis Research at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
A two-time American Cancer Society grantee, Dr. Brekken talked about his collaboration with an oncologist and new clinical trial, why basic science research is critical in the age of personalized medicine, and...pitching washers?
What role does the American Cancer Society play in cancer research? How is ACS working to move cancer research forward? Where will the Society's research program be in five years?
William Phelps thinks about these questions every day. As the American Cancer Society's Senior Vice President of Extramural Research, he oversees the largest private, not-for-profit source of cancer research funds in the United States.
In this conversation, Dr. Phelps provides insight into how the American Cancer Society is trying to maximize its impact on cancer research now and in the future.
When genomic DNA is transcribed into RNA, the RNA and DNA may get tangled with each other. This creates unusual RNA-DNA hybrid molecules, known as R-loops, that cause the DNA to be broken so that double-strand breaks form.
Dr. Karlene Cimprich and her team at Stanford University have pioneered research into R-loops and have shown that R-loops are present in cancer cells, sometimes in excess.
She’s joined in this conversation by Dr. Alan Zahler of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who leads a lab studying the regulation of pre-mRNA splicing and analysis of small RNA function and biogenesis.
Together they discuss the science behind R-loops and what’s on the horizon.
Anna Sorace is developing advanced imaging strategies to detect early whether breast cancer tumors are responding to therapy.
As she explains, "the eventual goal is to not just be able to monitor and predict response, but to be able to guide therapy interventions and better inform decision making for oncologists."
In this episode, Dr. Sorace—a biomedical engineer and cancer researcher based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham—explains how imaging can guide personalized medicine and provide an extraordinarily detailed look at the molecular status of tumors and how tumors change during the course of therapy.
For years, Dr. Kathy Goss ran a successful research program that sought to understand the molecular events driving colorectal and breast cancer. Along the way she developed a passion for science communication and advocacy.
Now she's using her unique blend of skills to help other scientists and advance cancer research.
As the senior science writer and director for strategic partnerships at the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center, Dr. Goss not only helps individual scientists advance their research programs, she also promotes the importance of cancer research to the public and to legislators.
Alex Wu is an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow in Johannes Walter's lab at Harvard Medical School, where he and his colleagues are focused on investigating the mechanisms of genome maintenance.
In this conversation he goes deep into the science behind several of their recent publications, including a Nature paper in which they showed that TRAIP is a master regulator of DNA interstrand crosslink repair.
Starting with a breakthrough discovery in 2005 as a PhD student, Marina Holz has helped change our understanding of cell biology.
In her conversation with ACS, Dr. Holz talked about her new research related to estrogen receptor-positive breast cancers. She also talked about what it’s like to be the Dean of the Graduate School of Basic Medical Sciences at New York Medical College, and she offered some great advice for young scientists.
1:45 – On her seminal 2005 paper: At this conference last fall…there was a person sitting next to me, and she said, “isn’t it amazing that 15 years later we’re still talking about this paper?” And it really was. It was really a proud moment for me, and I was really honored that our work really made an impact and laid this foundation that is very solid.
5:00 – On her most recent publication: In my lab—I started my lab a little over 12 years ago—we focus specifically on breast cancer, and about 70% of breast cancers are diagnosed as hormone dependent. Specifically, they are dependent on the hormone estrogen. This is what our recent paper is about—how estrogen controls protein synthesis in the cells.
9:45 – Why is it significant that 70% of breast cancer ceases are estrogen-receptor positive? Not all patients respond to endocrine therapy. For most patients, eventually, there is some sort of resistance that develops and they stop responding. So there’s really a need to understand exactly how estrogen acts in breast cancer and what other treatments we can offer to prevent the development of resistance and to really make endocrine therapy curative, as opposed to just something that allows the disease to be more of a chronic nature.
Former American Cancer Society grantee Neha Pankow already had a transdisciplinary background in engineering, biophysics, and cancer cell biology.
Now she’s added policymaking to the mix.
As a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation, she’s helping to develop policy for gender equity, STEM education, and the pursuit of interdisciplinary science.
3:20 – On how and why she became a AAAS fellow:
“I would say I’ve been interested in policy-related issues for most of my life, but I was definitely a scientist inside, and I never knew how to bridge those two things. For me the AAAS fellowship is doing exactly that.”
10:30 – On how her experience has opened new doors:
“And I thought this too as a graduate student and as a postdoc, that any kind of sidestep from my career meant that I was going to be throwing away everything that I had done until that point of time. And that’s absolutely not true. Especially for the AAAS fellowship I’ve seen friends and alumni who have either go back to academia because that’s what they wanted to do, I’ve seen people who have gone into working for nonprofits, people who work for federal agencies…”
A scientist and a storyteller, Michael Kinch has helped bring multiple drugs to clinic and authored three books.
In his new book, "The End of the Beginning: Cancer, Immunity, and the Future of a Cure, Dr. Kinch traces the history of cancer treatment and describes the extraordinary promise of immunotherapy.
As he explained to ACS, "we are amidst a truly revolutionary period where diseases that we assumed were going to kill the patient are now infinitely treatable.”
A former American Cancer Society grantee, Dr. Kinch is Associate Vice Chancellor, Director of the Center for Research Innovation, and Professor of Radiation Oncology at Washington University in St. Louis.
In this episode we spoke with Aasim Padela, MD, and Mark Lazenby, PhD, APRN, FAAN, about the unique needs and cancer health equity issues of the Muslim American community.
Dr. Aasim Padela is an emergency medicine physician, health services researcher, and bioethicist. He’s an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, where he’s the Director of the Program on Medicine and Religion and Director of the Initiative on Islam and Medicine. In his ACS-funded work he’s working with Muslim American communities to increase mammography screening rates.
Dr. Mark Lazenby is an Associate Professor of Nursing at Yale University. He is a philosopher of religion and an advanced practice cancer nurse. He’s interested in helping patients with a cancer diagnosis deal with the questions of mortality.
4:00 – (Lazenby) What we have found in our research so far is that Muslim patients don’t feel supported by spiritual care departments or by palliative care teams in their spiritual and religious needs. So they go to look for support outside, but often people outside of the cancer care community don’t understand cancer. So they’re caught in this bind of having no support within the cancer care community for their psychosocial/spiritual needs, and no support outside the cancer care community for the intersection of cancer needs and psychosocial/spiritual needs.
9:30 – (Padela): In my own work where I tried to assess what the particular health care disparities of Muslim patients were we found three things: (1) Gender issues/modesty issues; (2) spiritual accommodations; and (3) dietary accommodations.
14:30 – (Lazenby): We’ve found this in some of our participants—the belief that God is punishing the person for past deeds by giving them cancer. And this is not only unsettling for the patient; it’s unsettling for providers. So how do you approach this and not offend the person? And the potential for the person to draw meaning from the cancer experience. How do you turn it around from persecution to an opportunity for meaning-making?
Jan Eberth and Jesse Nodora are each working to eliminate cancer disparities and boost colorectal cancer screening rates.
Jan Eberth, of the University of South Carolina, is examining cancer screening accessibility in the U.S. and its impact on patient-level outcomes. She uses geospatial approaches and focuses in part on rural communities.
Jesse Nodora, of the University of California, San Diego, works closely with community health centers and aims to promote health at the individual, provider, and system level.
1:45 – On how they would describe their work to researchers in other fields:
(Eberth) “I study how processes and facets of the health care system and specific health policies impact patients who are at risk for or diagnosed with cancer…In my research I use a database of all colonoscopies that were completed in our state over a 15-year period. We link that information with our state cancer registry to help us learn more about…whether the geographic access that patients have to care is impacting their clinical outcome.”
(Nodora) “The work that I do really focuses on what I would label multi-level health promotion, specifically focused on increasing cancer screening…The multi-level part really is about addressing individual/patient level, provider team, and leadership/clinic administration level barriers and needs.”
5:25 – On the most important unanswered questions in their fields:
(Nodora) “How can law and policymakers work in partnership with researchers and other public servants to make the most equitable and impactful decisions? Often in our society, many of the high-level decisions that are made are not made for the public’s good or public health. They’re made for profit, or they’re made for the bottom line, and that is reflected in lobbying.”
(Eberth) “There have been studies that look at national- and state-level capacity, but there’s a lot less research that has looked at local-level capacity. It’s important to know where we’re losing access over time to important treatment services and screening services, so we can think about what solutions there are to halt those trends. And those might include things like: use of telehealth, use of mid-level providers, offering mobile clinics, and changing staffing patterns and credentialing requirements.”
13:40 – How they would describe their work to a colorectal cancer patient or survivor:
(Eberth) “Right now where you live, how much money you make, what type of insurance you have—it does dictate, unfortunately, where people get care and the type of care they get. To me that’s unacceptable…My research aims to find out where inequities exist—and find out why they exist—so that policymakers, clinicians, and public health practitioners can develop the types of programs and policies that are needed to address those issues directly.”
(Nodora) “The goal of what I’m trying to do at all levels–patient, provider, and system levels–at the end of the day it’s all about, for poor and underserved patients at community health centers, how do you increase those colorectal cancer screening rates?”
20:25 – The challenges of community-academic partnerships:
(Nodora) “Any kind of relationship is about trust. You want to start real early; develop the relationships, develop the trust, and basically listen to them… The one thing that there’s a real disconnect on is how long discovery takes. You want to impress upon your partners that you’re in it for the long haul.”
“That’s the beautiful thing about diet. You don’t have to have health insurance to make these changes. You don’t need a physician to make these changes. You just need the right motivation and the long-term commitment.”
What you do need, though, is evidence. American Cancer Society grantees Carrie Daniel-MacDougall, PhD, MPH, of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Xuehong Zhang, MD, ScD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital, are working to provide evidence that could have huge implications for colorectal cancer research.
3:10 – Carrie Daniel-MacDougall on her ACS-funded research: “With the dawning of the gut microbiome era, knowing that dry beans have various prebiotic properties, I thought it was important to revisit this question again with these new technologies and also with this growing population of colorectal cancer survivors, particularly overweight and obese survivors, who may be at risk of recurring or developing another obesity-related cancer.”
5:40 – Xuehong Zhang describes his colorectal cancer studies: “The objective of this proposed research is to determine the association between yogurt intake and colorectal cancer risk and survival. We hypothesize that higher yogurt consumption can decrease the risk of developing adenomas—the precursor to colorectal cancer—as well as improve survival among patients with colorectal cancer.”
10:05 – On some of the challenges of recruiting colorectal cancer survivors, even at one of the largest cancer centers in the country: “We’ve also learned that some of them kind of have PTSD in terms of returning to the hospital for blood draws and participation in the study… Beyond all the science and the mechanism, there’s a behavioral aspect to working with people and working with patients that’s important to recognize.”
16:00 – Next steps for Dr. Daniel-MacDougall: “The next phase, if we find that this is promising, is to go multi-center, and that’s going to be a bigger, scarier, harder-to-get grant…We’re also always building up the next thing or how we’re going to get to the next step and that’s trying to do more dietary assessments and dietary-based research in cancer patients going on to active treatment.”
18:55 – New directions Dr. Zhang would like to take his study: “…Lactic acid is much (lower) in yogurt and is more palatable to individuals with lactose intolerance, so that motivates me to think more about how to expand the current research into other racial and ethnic groups, especially among the black population.”
21:35 – What can we tell patients about primary prevention of colorectal cancer? “The vast majority of colorectal cancer can be prevented by maintaining healthy weight, being physically active, and having a healthy diet… To me the healthy lifestyle is the key to colorectal cancer primary prevention. Clearly, screening and early detection is also important.”
“Because it’s so accessible, because everyone eats and everyone has fun tweaking their diets, sometimes people forget it’s science that we actually study quite intensely in school. And so you’ll give someone your take on something and they’re like, ‘Well, but you know I’ve heard this ketogenic diet is the thing I should be doing.’ Our challenge is to keep it scientific and evidence-based…it’s a huge challenge that not a lot of people face in other fields.”
For this conversation we brought together an MD, an MD/PhD, and a PhD working in a clinical department. Their research is all relevant to inflammation and is relevant to colorectal cancer, but they’re coming at it from different directions.
Ronen Sumagin, PhD, of Northwestern University, is interested in the immune system and inflammation.
Jason C. Mills, MD, PhD, of Washington University, St. Louis, is focused on the upper part of the GI tract and in how inflammation affects stem cells.
Iswar K. Hariharan, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley, works on Drosophila and is interested in what regulates cell growth.
Highlights include:
7:30 – “We’re interested in the interactions between the cancer cells and their almost normal neighbors and trying to find ways in which we can perhaps empower the normal cells to kick the cancer cells out of the epithelium.”
9:25 – “In the pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma field there’s a series of experiments that culminated in one that exemplified both the inflammatory aspect and developmental aspect of tumorigenesis…”
18:00 – “…but on the other hand, I do think that shutting off growth when a tissue reaches the right size has something to do with cancer.”
20:15 – “In the 1950s and 1960s a Swiss biologist…showed that injured Drosophila tissues could switch fates in a dramatic way…for instance a tissue that normally makes a leg, if you damage it enough, could end up making a wing. There was this plasticity that was induced by exposure to damage. We published a paper a year ago in eLife where we tried to dissect this phenomenon genetically…”
25:45 – “Our research is all about the interplay with the immune system and that cell autonomous decision to become a dangerous clone that no longer listens to cues about size or growth and that neighboring cells can’t control. But we’re all studying the same thing from slightly different perspectives.”
32:15 – “The way I view cancer is that it is basically a non-healing wound and we should treat it as such.”
The American Cancer Society not only funds cancer research, it also employs dozens of scientists who are among the leaders of their respective fields.
ACS researchers Stacey Fedewa, Pete Campbell, and Becky Siegel talk about the colorectal cancer research they're conducting related to risk factors, health equity issues, and the rise in early-onset colorectal cancer.
1:15 – On some of the most important unanswered questions in their field – “We know that no two tumors look alike on a molecular level. What are the causes and consequences of that tumor heterogeneity?”
4:50 – On how much we’ll able to learn from CPS-2 and CPS-3 – “In CPS-2 we just finished targeted sequencing of about 800 samples from people diagnosed with colon cancer. We just started looking at the data now. It’s literally hot off the presses…And CPS-3 is only going to be bigger…We’re able to measure things in the blood that happen prior to diagnosis, we have extensive survey information years before their diagnosis, and then we’ll have tumor samples from their colorectal surgery.”
6:30 – On the increase in colorectal cancer incidence in young adults – “Millennials now have twice the risk of colon cancer diagnosis compared to someone born in the 1950s at the same age. And for rectal cancer…it’s four times higher. And no one right now knows why this is happening.”
17:15 – The Medicare loophole and its implications – “Medicare will cover ‘screening colonoscopies,’ but the way (Medicare) defined screening colonoscopies is if there was no polyp found. So if somebody comes in for a screening colonoscopy and a polyp is found it will be deemed ‘diagnostic,’ and then they might be charged up to 20% for a colonoscopy…People are being asked to put a credit card down when they get a colonoscopy.”
22:00 – Why does their work matter to colorectal cancer patients – “Very, very few studies have data on patients before they became patients and after they were patients. CPS-2 has been going on since 1992, so with that amount of follow-up time, we’re able to follow people into their 80s and 90s and see what factors really influence that long-term survival.”
In this episode Jason Locasale, PhD (Duke University), and Nan Gao, PhD (Rutgers, The State University), talk with the American Cancer Society about how metabolism is functioning in intestinal epithelial cells, and the difference between how normal epithelial cells and stem cells in the epithelium function. They also talk at length about the interesting role played by the microbiome.
This conversation with Dan Erkes, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Thomas Jefferson University, was interesting because he talked, not only about the challenges and opportunities around drug resistance for melanoma, but also about how rewarding it is to conduct research in a community that's actively supporting him.
2:00 – On his research into the mechanisms of drug resistance for melanoma – “There are a lot of new drugs coming out that really help patients in a lot of different ways, but most patients are still developing diseases that the drugs don’t do anything to anymore. We’re trying to figure out either new ways we can treat those tumors or ways in which those cancers have become resistant to those drugs.”
3:22 – What it was like to find out he got funded “I got two really great things from the phone call. First off, I got feedback from scientific reviewers, which was really helpful for my growing as a scientist. But also, just to know that the grant was funded and to know that, now I have job stability, our lab is now able to hire other people and we’re able to do this research more quickly and just that people I guess liked my ideas.
4:45 – Progress the lab has made since the grant was funded – “The thing that I’m most excited about is that we’re taking tumors that are resistant to these FDA-approved drugs and asking, can we use a BET inhibitor in that situation? If a patient were to fail a drug could they then get a BET inhibitor potentially as a salvage therapy to help them later down the treatment line?”
7:00 – On the community of support around him – “I grew up in Cheltenham, which is a suburb just north of Philadelphia and I’m a native Pennsylvanian. Just this idea that there is a group of people out there who have means and are able to give back to the community – it’s really amazing. I’m able to stay in the city I love and the community I love based on other people in my community.”
8:45 – On challenges publishing his work – “We haven’t necessarily gotten the feedback we were hoping for. Right now the main struggle has been what do we actually add to this project to finish it off, what are the specific things we need to do, because we kept doing a lot of different things that never seem to make the reviewers happy.”
Treating patients at the St. Louis Veterans Affairs Medical Center led Ken Carson, MD, PhD, to investigate questions about racial disparities in treatment of patients with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma.
He still sees patients once a week, and his success as a researcher has led him to Flatiron Health, where he serves as senior medical director and focuses on real-world evidence generation.
1:15 – On his ACS-funded research on “racial disparities in outcomes among patients who have a common form of lymphoma”
4:50 – On transitioning to doing big data work and his work at Flatiron Health – “The ultimate objective is having every patient’s experience help inform the next patient’s experience.”
11:10 – Advice for his younger self – “You don’t have to follow the traditional academic mold”
13:20 – What he’s most excited about – “As we better understand how to capture adverse events and treatment toxicities with big data, we’ll be able to explore that further with the ultimate goal of improving—not just response, progression-free survival, and overall survival—but also patient quality of life during treatment.”
Four-time American Cancer Society grantee Dr. Pam Kreeger, Associate Professor in the Dept. of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, talked about she's leveraging ACS funding to bring her research on metastasis in ovarian cancer closer to benefiting patients.
2:10 – On her four different ACS grants (a Postdoctoral Fellowship, Institutional Research Grant pilot award, Research Scholar Grant, and Mission Boost Grant) – “I’m not exaggerating when I say to people that I probably owe my career to ACS”
4:53 – On the science behind her Mission Boost Grant – “It builds from the Research Scholar Grant, where after about three years of work we decoded this mechanism where the macrophages in the ovarian cancer microenvironment can actually change the behavior of the mesothelial cells.”
6:10 – On why the Mission Boost Grant is a good fit “This isn’t a great R01 project. It wouldn’t be a great R01 project until you find the mechanism. You can’t really propose to do all this pre-clinical and clinical modeling until you have a good mechanism, but then once that’s where you’re at that’s not really enough to be an R01. And yet to propose a full clinical trial – we’re not there yet either.”
9:20 – On curiosity and taking research to the next step – “(If you) find something interesting as a basic scientist, it’s not like there are people just waiting out there to take your idea to the next step. They have their own projects and their own favorite children to work on. So unless you are really willing to keep going with it, it’s very easy for stuff to just fall off.”
13:20 – Advice she would give to someone applying for a Mission Boost Grant – “What was incredibly helpful to me was having discussions with clinical collaborators, because in my mind I didn’t see the steps between preclinical mouse study and full-blown trial in human patients that would mimic exactly that mouse study.”
15:45 – On how cancer touches everyone and how people can give back – “I know as a researcher I benefit greatly from all the patients who consent to donate tissue…It seems like a small thing…but that’s really what’s going to allow us to move forward.”
Jo Handelsman is director of the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, and that's just the latest step in research career that began with an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship in 1984.
She's a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, co-founder of the Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute, and founder of the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching.
She was the associate director for science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and President Obama awarded her the Presidential Award for Science Mentoring.
And she's nationally recognized for her work on understanding implicit biases.
ACS talked with her about:
4:38 - On her book, Entering Mentoring: A Seminar to Train a New Generation of Scientists – “We started interviewing faculty that we thought were great mentors, and all of them said, ‘I don’t know anything about mentoring; I just make a lot of mistakes.’ So we thought, ‘You know maybe we could do a little better than this,’ and that’s how we developed the course. It really evolved from what the mentors and mentees told us.”
8:58 – “I always tell junior faculty, if you can’t get other people to run the seminar, just run it yourself. I guarantee you’ll have people who want to take it, and you’ll learn so much from teaching it. And of course, you don’t really have to ‘teach’ it. I’ve taught it dozens of times now and I think I still learn almost as much the 20th time as I did the 1st time.”
10:35 – The story behind her landmark 2012 paper, "Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students" – “If you imagine the hundreds of interactions that a given faculty member will have or that a student will have with all their faculty…If you imagine the males are getting just a little more time, or they’re being encouraged to try for slightly more ambitious internships, research experiences or jobs…You can see why men and women end up in very different places.”
13:05 – On why the study’s results didn’t surprise her – “This is an old story in the field of psychology, but when I would talk about studies like this (and there are hundreds of them, if not thousands, out there), scientists would always say, ‘But we’re trained to be objective, so we don’t do that.’ And of course, that shows a certain lack of understanding of what implicit or unconscious bias is. Science trains us in our cognitive minds to be objective but that doesn’t influence our biases. Frankly if it did, then we wouldn’t have to run blind experiments.”
15:45 – On the video interventions she’s developed to address the issue – “We think there are ways to address these implicit biases even if they’re kind of stuck in our deep brains and can’t be rooted out. We can certainly deal with their impact.”
19:20 – Advice she’d give to a young scientist on how to address implicit gender bias – “It’s not an accusation against white men. It’s not a plot to keep women and minorities out of academic science. This is just something all people do. And I think when you present it that way and say that becoming aware of it is a way to be more fair, get better people hired, better grants funded, and better papers accepted, it becomes a lot less threatening to people.”
23:20 – On her 3-year term under President Obama as the Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy – “He really did seem to have a special respect for, appreciation for, and just kind of nerdy enjoyment of science. So it was always exciting to talk science with him and to develop policy for him and with him. That was probably one of the greatest privileges of my life—working for him.”
29:13 – On the impact of ACS funding at the start of her career – “Well I think the ACS postdoctoral fellowship made me very aware of the unity of biology very early on…biology is biology and what we learn in one aspect is probably going to have some relevance to other aspects of biology.”
Karen Freund, MD, MPH, an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor at Tufts University, discusses the rewards of being a mentor, her approach to mentoring, and how she would explain to a patient or survivor why it's so important to devote time to mentoring.
Former American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow Shin-Yi Lin talks with the American Cancer Society about:
1:38 – Her work on nematodes – creating new model organisms beyond C. elegans 5:50 – Next steps after her postdoctoral fellowship ends 7:35 – On how the phrase “work-life balance” understates the challenges faced by young scientists 11:00 – On the ACS-Jiler Professors and Postdocs conference and the benefits of attending earlier in the fellowship 19:17 – On her outreach experiences and the interaction between science and serving the communities we live in 23:30 – How funders could support young scientists raising families 25:45 – On building connections with other Fellows
Drs. Matthew Meyerson and Alison Taylor of Dana-Farber Cancer Center talk with the American Cancer Society about:
2:30 – Challenges of being a mentor 4:27 – One of the most important things in science 6:08 – On mentoring a scientifically diverse group 8:52 – What’s the one thing you would change about being a postdoc? 11:08 – On learning to manage people and be a mentor as a postdoc 20:04 – How to be the best mentee/mentor you can be
Dr. Katy Rezvani of MD Anderson talks with the American Cancer Society about the:
1:30 – Biden Cancer Summit and Cancer Moonshot at MD Anderson. 2:55 – Urgency and excitement in immunotherapy 4:40 – On why she decided to go after natural killer cells instead of T cells 8:13 – Could there really be an off-the-shelf CAR NK cell? 9:12 – Three advantages of CAR NK cells 13:26 – Clinical trial she’s leading at MD Anderson 15:00 – Crucial early support from ACS
Dr. Eliezer Van Allen of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute talks about the:
2:15 – Core principles of his lab 3:45 – Challenges of team science; how to build strong culture 8:00 - Patient-driven research & liberation of data and metastatic prostate cancer project 11:38 –Empowering patients to liberate and access their clinical data; mechanism for them to donate data to future research 13:10 – reservations that patients have about sharing data 15:27 - Cancer immunotherapy, genomics, and big data 18:40 – How far the field has come in past few years (from exomes to genomes, bulk tumor samples to single cells) 19:50 – Why it’s team science at its best—putting medical oncology fellows alongside AI experts 21:05 – Why a cancer patient would be glad to know ACS is funding computational oncology