Though cancer is a dangerous disease that has plagued humanity for millennia, the cure for it still remains a myth, with misconceptions around it convoluting its treatment. To help address this problem, activists and scientists at the University of Michigan have been researching cancer to provide patients with the best possible care and treatment.
On average, 1,670 Americans die from cancer each day. A cellular disease that can occur anywhere in the body, cancer can occur when some of the body’s cells grow uncontrollably. This can obstruct or damage organs, body systems, blood vessels or other essential bodily functions.The study and research of cancer is called oncology, an evolving field of cellular biology, genetics and computational medicine that strives to provide the best care to cancer patients.
The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, a branch of the American Cancer Society focused on policy making and stressing the importance of research collaboration has a chapter on campus which focuses on policymaking in oncology to protect cancer patients and support scientific research. Members of ACS CAN can petition policymakers for legal change and bring awareness to cancer research conducted at the University to gain funding for research. LSA sophomore Riya Gandhi, founder of the U-M chapter of ACS CAN, spoke with The Michigan Daily about how her organization operates.
“It’s a national organization, and (ACS CAN) deals with the political side of cancer advocacy,” Gandhi said. “So they deal with the ground level, grassroots advocacy, talking to lawmakers, senators, congressmen, etc., to make sure that the policies that they have on their agenda are beneficial for cancer patients and their families.”
Along with cancer activism, Gandhi also focuses on supporting academic research on the disease. Gandhi said she collaborates closely with faculty at the University to help them gain funding for their research.
“(We looked at) researchers from the Rogel Cancer Center and then (saw) the political impacts of that research as well,” Gandhi said. “So we asked the professors what more funding would do for them and how this would help benefit cancer patients and their families.”
The Rogel Cancer Center at the University Hospital is ranked among the best in the nation for oncology research. The Center conducts computational cancer research and delivers patient care at a quality ranked highly by U.S. News. Much of their research focuses on using statistics and genetics to deliver specialized patient care, using numerical methods to decide which medicine or treatment is best.
In an interview with The Daily, Dr. Marcin Cieslik, an affiliate of the Rogel Cancer Center at the U-M Department of Pathology, explained why this methodology is useful in his research in cancer genetics, which is the study of different genes that might contribute to the development or proliferation of human cancer.
“It’s important to emphasize to many readers how heterogeneous cancer is,” Cieslik said. “Most people will realize that prostate cancer is different from breast cancer. But even if you take one of those cancer types, there will be multiple subtypes and even beyond that, every individual tumor will be genetically distinct from the other, which then means that we need typically large sets of those tumors in order to start seeing patterns.”
To work with these large datasets, Cieslik and his team use statistics and computation for processing, which he said allows him to see the patterns that may be hidden under terabytes or petabytes of cancer data.
“My lab is a cancer genomics lab, which means that we focus on cancer genomics and we use computational approaches and statistical approaches to understand cancer better,” Cieslik said. “We apply standard analysis approaches motivated by our understanding of human genetics (and) biology, but also just plain statistics to understand those mutations and their context.”
Computational genetics has informed a new kind of health care called precision health, which uses a patient’s genetic data to deliver personalized care. Using a patient’s genetic data allows medical professionals to gain a better understanding of a patient’s condition, as some symptoms or mutations are only visible at the genetic level.
“And this (genetic profile) report outlines certain therapeutic avenues that might have not been obvious from all of the previous tests that have been done on patients,” Cieslik said. “It’s oftentimes called precision oncology because the treatment of the patient should be directly informed in a precise way by the patient’s genetics (and) tumor mutation.”
The kind of statistical analysis and methodology development used by Cieslik and his colleagues is called bioinformatics, a recent integration of data science and biology. The University’s Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics investigates the kind of problems and methods used by researchers like Cieslik. This department also collaborates closely with other U-M departments to complement their research. Dr. Lana Garmire at the U-M DCMB elaborated on this collaboration in an interview with The Daily.
“So now I think bioinformatics is a broad term and describes the field where you utilize a large amount of high throughput data sets (and) complex types of open data to interrogate a biological mechanism and a pattern much better than the traditional experimental-only approach,” Garmire said. “So it’s kind of a very good complimentary approach.”
The complementary nature of bioinformatic research facilitates this integration of data science and biology. Many other health-related departments and schools that encounter cancer can benefit from the statistical or computational approaches used in bioinformatics. Garmire explained how she personally has collaborated with others at the University.
“Cross-disciplinary collaboration is very possible,” Garmire said. “For example, from my work, I have been collaborating with people from different domains from (the School of Dentistry) to (the College of Pharmacy) or School of Public Health and Medical School.”
Collaboration is an important theme in cancer research. Not only do different U-M departments collaborate with each other, but the University as a whole collaborates with other national institutions as well. According to Cieslik, the University is one of four data analysis centers in the country for a consortium of American institutions called the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium.
“There’s an ongoing project, which involves faculty from multiple departments,” Cieslik said. “It’s called CPTAC. … It’s a multi-institutional national effort to perform (a multi-disciplinary) characterization of tumors. The University of Michigan has one of the centers in that consortium. That center is called the PGDAC.”
This collaboration allows researchers to combine several kinds of molecular biology techniques into one stronger theory of cancer development. The synergy between the different experts in the consortium allows cancer researchers to study the topic from different intellectual perspectives, which contributes to new findings or conclusions.
“My lab contributes the genomics expertise, Arul Chinnaiyan’s lab contributes the cancer biology experience,” Cieslik said. “Now, through this integrative lens of looking at the DNA, RNA and protein all together when trying to understand the heterogeneity of the disease, (we try) to identify biomarkers or make new discoveries about the molecular aspects of a particular cancer type.”
Daily News Reporter Amer Goel can be reached at amergoel@umich.edu.