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Until now, cancer research has largely focused on targeting specific genes or proteins involved with cell division and developing drugs for those targets. UVA’s new center will go deeper, focusing on how genes and proteins interact with each other within organelles, the “little organs” such as mitochondria that reside within cells and perform specialized functions. By understanding the interactions and processes of organelles as a network, UVA researchers plan to identify different ways to think about therapies that can disrupt tumor growth.

“So far, cancer researchers have done a good job assembling the ‘parts list’ involved in cancer,” said Kevin Janes, the John Marshall Money Professor of Biomedical Engineering at UVA Engineering and co-director of the center. “Rather than approaching cancer as a parts problem, we hope to discover how cell parts work together in a system when it comes to cancer.”

“We hope to reframe how all the parts of a cancer cell work together by organizing the questions around organelles,” said Matthew J. Lazzara, professor of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering and center co-director. “This new blueprint should provide fresh clues about therapies.”

Kevin Janes, left, and Matthew J. Lazzara, will direct the new center. (Contributed photo)

The National Cancer Institute thinks UVA has the right stuff to make substantial advancements, based on the University’s deep expertise in systems biology, cancer biology and biomedical data sciences.

“We are immensely proud of the team of investigators who developed this grant and eagerly await the important scientific advancements that are certain to occur over the next few years as engineers, cancer biologists and oncologists work together toward unraveling cancer biology,” said Frederick H. Epstein, UVA Engineering’s associate dean for research and the Mac Wade Professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

The new research center has many affiliations with the UVA Cancer Center, one of only 53 cancer centers in the country the National Cancer Institute has designated as comprehensive. The designation recognizes elite cancer centers with the most rigorous standards for innovative research and leading-edge clinical trials.

“An essential feature of a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center is the ability to foster team science that is interdisciplinary in nature,” said Dr. Thomas P. Loughran Jr., director of the UVA Cancer Center. “The new research center is a great example of such success that led to UVA’s designation.”

Gaining New Views at the Perfect Zoom Setting

“The sweet spot for today’s cancer systems biology lies within cells – it’s at the perfect zoom setting for finding clues about complex pathways and networks,” Janes said. 

“Cancer research focused on all genes, all proteins or all cells is very dense – so dense that its meaning gets lost in the raw information, even with the aid of computers and the most advanced artificial intelligence methods,” he continued. “We need to examine this information at a scale where it naturally organizes – the organelles that make up each cell.”

Lazzara said fundamentally new perspectives are needed to advance basic science research in cancer. “Ultimately, new scientific understanding translates into improved therapies,” he said. “We feel an urgency, and even a responsibility, to look at the problem in new ways.”

At the highest level, the aim of the center is understanding how cancer adapts to the stress of oncogenes – genes that endow cells with the ability to form tumors – in order to proceed to full-blown cancer, Lazzara said.

“We think studying the organelle parts of the system before and after oncogenes are activated and up to the point where cancer takes over the cell is a good approach,” he said. “There is little-to-no systems-level understanding of how such adaptations occur and what vulnerabilities might be created for stopping cancer.”

The center’s plan brings together 14 accomplished researchers and research-active clinicians from across many UVA disciplines. The group has a strong track record of extensive, collaborative research with one another.

The center also seeks to grow the cancer systems biology community further at UVA through pilot grants, which will be supported by cost-sharing from the UVA Cancer Center and the Office of the Vice President for Research. With this growth, the center hopes to cultivate diverse perspectives on cancer and systems biology.

“Through great innovation and collaboration, UVA is now poised to make great discoveries in cancer research in the coming years, and this NIH grant will help our researchers move from prominence to preeminence,” said Melur “Ram” Ramasubramanian, vice president for research. “This is an exemplar of convergence that is required to address the challenging questions the researchers will tackle through this center. We look forward to helping this research continue to grow.”

New Multidisciplinary Research

For more than a decade, the UVA schools of Engineering and Medicine, together with the UVA Cancer Center, have laid the foundation needed to accomplish the new research center’s aims.

The strategic and organic evolution of research and collaboration at UVA has provided the resources needed for the new research group to coalesce and approach cancer in a novel way.

“What has been evolving over the last 10 to 15 years at the School of Engineering is a huge upswell in systems biology and computational biology approaches, including in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, where I have my primary appointment, and in the Department of Chemical Engineering, where Matt has his primary appointment,” Janes said. “As a group, we have been very active in building connections with the School of Medicine’s basic science faculty and clinical faculty.”

“Cancer cell biology and cell signaling biology are part of the fabric of UVA,” Lazzara said. “Some of our research plans are based on discoveries made at UVA by luminaries in the field decades before Kevin and I arrived here.”

The Department of Biomedical Engineering, housed within the UVA Health complex, has become a highly integrated partnership between the UVA schools of Engineering and Medicine. UVA is one of fewer than 10 top research universities with schools of engineering and medicine located so close together, a proximity that fosters close collaboration.

Researchers will analyze models and high-resolution fluorescence images, like this one of a brain-cancer cell, with stained organelles. (Contributed photo)

“This center will give us a sophisticated new perspective on cancer and provide insights that could dramatically advance cancer care for patients,” said Dr. Melina R. Kibbe, dean of the School of Medicine and chief health affairs officer for UVA Health. “It will be exciting to see this cutting-edge collaboration bring together the wide-ranging expertise at the School of Medicine and School of Engineering to make important strides in cancer research.”

UVA has a long track record of translating research into treatments that help patients directly.

“We have clinicians at the UVA Cancer Center who are on our team,” Lazzara said. “So many of us have already been working with them for a long time. We believe our research will inform their efforts to develop effective new therapies.”

“The possibilities for how to combine approved drugs or investigational drugs for these therapies is immense,” he continued. “You can’t just guess how to combine these. We’re really dedicated to making sure we incorporate the clinical aspect into our research and contribute to eventual discoveries of new treatments.”

The new center’s research adds to UVA’s longtime strength in advanced biomedical imaging by analyzing cell structures through layers upon layers of high-resolution fluorescence images.

With expertise in both advanced imaging and data science, the imaging team will support the new research center’s teams by crunching through all the high-content imaging data along with other comparative data, like anonymized patient records and diagnostics.

Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

In addition to providing expertise in their respective research areas and co-directing the center, Janes and Lazzara designed the center’s overall research strategy – an intentional framework that supports rapid advancement.

Three complementary cancer projects will be working in parallel on organelles relevant to breast cancer, colorectal cancer and glioblastoma, the most prevalent form of brain cancer.

The center goes beyond its individual research projects through strong communication and feedback among all members, with agile and communal decision-making that guides continuous improvement.  

“The magic of real discovery comes when researchers triangulate and see the same types of phenomena, making concurrent predictions in multiple different systems at different scales,” Janes said. “Then, you feel like you’re onto something and your hypothesis is viable.

“The sum of the center should be greater than the individual parts,” he said. “We hope to identify themes in each one of those projects that generalize across the other cancer types. This is how we hope to advance all three research efforts.”

The breast cancer project co-led by Janes will study an organelle that has long been involved in cell replication as far back as amphibians in evolution. It is so important to cell division that cancer cells cannot mutate it or they die themselves. Instead, cancer cells change the abundance of the organelle just enough to drive cell division forward while making errors occasionally. Janes’ team has built a computer model of this organelle that makes predictions about what changes in abundance are “just right” for the cancer and “just wrong” for the patient.

“Because of the foundational work we are doing, the center’s advancements have the potential for application to many cancers,” Janes said. “And perhaps other diseases where the same organelles are misregulated.”

The center will benefit from Janes’ research and perspective as a member of the UVA Center for Public Health Genomics. Research at this center is focused on moving from basic discoveries in genetics and genomics into clinical settings with the goal of improving the delivery of health care and disease prevention.

The new center also will become part of the Cancer Systems Biology Consortium, a domestic research campaign of universities, institutes, companies and national laboratories sponsored by the National Cancer Institute with international partners across the globe. Members of the consortium share data and findings, and centers collaborate with one another across the country.

“This is the new paradigm for cancer systems biology research. Images, data and protocols developed in my lab will be shared with Kevin’s lab, and with labs across the consortium, to ask if our findings in glioblastoma translate to other cancer settings,” Lazzara said, who is co-leading the glioblastoma project.