The word collaboration to me really is
something that’s essential for research.
Collaboration is absolutely essential for success in science,
particularly for science that’s as complicated as cancer.
No one person has expertise to understand all the tools, all the technologies.
We need to have experts in many different fields work together in order to be successful.
Bringing them together and letting them teach each other
and develop completely new approaches to solving cancer.
It’s a chance to dramatically accelerate the progress of research.
That’s what the future is, that’s what we’re excited about.
My name is Lewis Cantley and I am Director of the Sandra and Edward Meyer
Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Cancer is incredibly complicated.
Virtually no two people have exactly the same cancer
There are thousands of genes that can be mutated
For decades cancer research has relied upon
cancer cell lines
These are cells grown on plastic that don’t represent the true cancer
Now however we can actually grow the tumors
outside the patient as an organoid that very much mimics the true tumor growing
in all of its heterogeneity Our goal at this point is to understand the
very early steps of metastasis and how we can prevent them with drugs.
My name is Claudia Fishbach-Teschl I’m an associate professor at the Meinig
School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell and I’m the director of the new Center on
the Physics of Cancer Metabolism.
For us to really run meaningful experiments we need to capture the heterogeneity that
is representative of the patient.
Weill Cornell is providing us with patient-derived cells in the form of organoids
and then we place them into our model systems culture models
including micro-fluidic devices that we’re fabricating here at the center for
nano-scale fabrication.
So now you can imagine putting an organoid into an engineered environment that will allow us to
mimic what’s more representative of the body
of a normal patient.
In a petri dish you have a soup in which the cells are based,
and they’re always exposed to the same molecules, there’s no temporal difference,
and here in these microfluidic devices we can pattern channels
into three dimensional cultures and
now look at how tumor cells interact with blood vessels and how we can use them
to deliver drugs and test how they’re being distributed,
and this is something that cannot be done without three dimensional culture devices.
The goal is to identify drugs or drug combinations that are already approved
that we can identify the patients that will respond to that drug or drug combination
and initiate a trial to prove that it actually works.
Pharmaceutical companies don’t have access to these fresh biopsies of metastatic patients.
We do.
We are seeing a time in cancer that’s really the tipping point that’s going to change
the whole process of therapy and have a huge impact in the disease.
I’m very excited about the future.
The future is extremely exciting in many ways and
I think cancer research is having another revolution.
In the end all we care about is to improve patients’ lives and to increase the chance
for them to be treated more successfully.
I’m super excited because we get to work together and
we’re going to do great things together.