{"id":18024,"date":"2023-01-24T14:50:24","date_gmt":"2023-01-24T19:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=18024"},"modified":"2023-01-24T15:11:53","modified_gmt":"2023-01-24T20:11:53","slug":"how-cancer-cells-organize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2023\/01\/how-cancer-cells-organize\/","title":{"rendered":"How Cancer Cells Organize"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cover<\/a>\"Photo <\/a><\/p>\n

\n

“<\/span>By measuring what genes are being expressed in what cells while maintaining the spatial organization of the cells in tissues, we can begin tackling important questions in clinical oncology.”<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0Jean Fan<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is a certain class of pediatric brain cancers that is \u201cuniversally deadly,\u201d with a median survival of 15 months and few, if any, viable treatment options. The key to combating these cancers might be in analyzing how the cells within tumor tissue\u2014cancer cells, immune cells, and others\u2014express genes and organize themselves spatially, says Jean Fan<\/a> BS \u201913, assistant professor of biomedical engineering<\/a> and a member of the Center for Computational Biology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to understand how [these cells] are interacting with each other to promote disease development, and how those interactions might enable different responses to treatments,\u201d says Fan, whose lab specializes in developing computational models and statistical analysis. \u201cBy measuring what genes are being expressed in what cells while maintaining the spatial organization of the cells in tissues, we can begin tackling important questions in clinical oncology.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are many questions to answer: What are the different states and subpopulations of cancer cells, and how are they organized? What happens to those cells when a patient receives clinical intervention? How do the cell populations shift in proportion to the intervention What role do spatial organizational patterns play?<\/p>\n

These questions were unanswerable just a few years ago. Before recent advances in spatial transcriptomics technologies, researchers would have to dissociate cells in a tissue, losing the cell\u2019s spatial organization, if they wanted to study many genes in a single cell at once, Fan says. Cellular spatial organization with fine cell state information was beyond their grasp.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like we were taking pictures, but they were black and white,\u201d says Fan, whose interest in studying cancer genes was fostered during undergraduate work with biomedical engineering<\/a> professor Rachel Karchin<\/a>. \u201cNow we can take much richer pictures with 10,000 different colors, each corresponding to different genes.\u201d<\/p>\n

While her lab work hasn\u2019t yet reached pediatric patients, Fan found another way to share her passion with children. She noticed when volunteering at an after-school science club for second-grade girls that the students didn\u2019t see themselves as scientists, even as they were experimenting. \u201cThey would casually say things like, \u2018I\u2019m not a math person,\u2019\u201d Fan remembers.<\/p>\n

At the end of the program, Fan wrote and illustrated personalized storybooks that depicted each girl in various science, technology, engineering, and math careers. Fan then established CuSTEMized<\/a>, a nonprofit that uses computation to make it possible for anyone to personalize these STEM-focused stories. \u201cComputation has a lot of potential,\u201d Fan says, \u201cand when we empower our students with computational skills, they will do great things.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“By measuring what genes are being expressed in what cells while maintaining the spatial organization of the cells in tissues, we can begin tackling important questions in clinical oncology.” \u2014\u00a0Jean Fan   There is a certain class of pediatric brain cancers that is \u201cuniversally deadly,\u201d with a median survival of 15 months and few, if…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":18113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-impact","issue-winter-2023"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Cancer Cells Organize - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2023\/01\/how-cancer-cells-organize\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Cancer Cells Organize - 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