Acs Research - Theorylab

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 dep

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 g

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

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 t

“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 c

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 infl

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 tumo

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,

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, progre

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 cli

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 devel

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