Visitor of the Week: Jemma Dunn

Meet Jemma Dunn of the University of Plymouth (United Kingdom)! Jemma is a postdoctoral researcher in Oliver Hanemann’s lab, as well as a participant in the 2020 Mechanisms & Models of Cancer virtual meeting. She presented a poster entitled, “Integrated transcriptome-proteome profiling of meningioma” and has this to say of her virtual poster presentation experience:

As the meeting was virtual, I was really impressed at the ease of still being able to provide a poster and how this was coordinated by the meeting organizers. I would go as far as to say it was more useful to be able to view all posters online and search for research you are interested in much quicker than walking around many poster stands! It was also great to be able to still talk directly with the author of a poster if you wished through the Slack platform and for other participants to contact me with questions about my poster.     

Tell us about your research.
My research focusses on providing a deeper insight into the molecular characterization of meningioma, the most common primary intracranial tumor, by exploring expression patterns at both the transcript and protein level using an integrated omics approach. Following this, we have highlighted molecular candidates with potential as therapeutic targets or biomarkers of these tumors and are in the process of functionally validating these.

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
At present, there are still no effective pharmacological interventions for meningioma and following surgical resection, the most aggressive form of this tumor, WHO grade III, are prone to recurrence and remain therapeutically challenging. Thus, we wanted to build upon previous omics studies and for the first time, investigate the transcriptome-proteome profile of grade III meningioma compared to slow-growing grade I meningioma. In this way, we were able to identify expression patterns across two molecular levels and elucidate potential therapeutic targets or biomarkers that may provide future benefit for grade III diagnosed meningioma patients.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
I initially pursued a PhD and scientific career as I enjoyed unravelling the molecular mechanisms leading to a specific pathological state. However, throughout my PhD and continued research I am most inspired when I speak to the public during our lab tours. This is when I remember the end goal of our work and why it is so paramount. If the research we are undertaking will in some way, small or large, eventually travel from bench to bedside and benefit the patient then we have achieved our objectives. 

What impact do you hope to make through your work?
I hope the research we are undertaking in meningioma here, at University of Plymouth, will contribute to the comprehensive multi-omics overview of these tumors, and ultimately, aid in providing effective patient diagnosis and treatment.

What do you love most about being a researcher?
I really enjoy the challenge of attempting to discover what is happening on the molecular level in order to unpick the changes leading to a pathological state, almost like finding the missing pieces to a puzzle. However, as well as the experimental side, which may or may not always go to plan, the interactions within the research environment I work are also a large contributor as to why I love being a researcher. To be able to discuss hypotheses, successful and failed experiments, as well as expand my knowledge of different fields daily through communicating with colleagues is truly invaluable to my own progression.

What drew you to attend this meeting?
As research is constantly changing and advancing so quickly, with ever expanding fields alongside new or improved techniques to investigate them, I believe it is imperative to attend meetings such as this one to broaden your knowledge outside of your current research. My research is now moving towards cancer metabolism, an area I have not delved into previously. I am thus interested to learn of current research in this field from the scientists themselves through their talks and hopefully take away some ideas that I could apply to my own research. 

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
My key takeaway is that in order to continue progressing and move ever closer to translatable treatment for the patient, collaboration between scientists is vital. Through collaboration and shared ideas, techniques and sample numbers can be optimized to provide the strongest overview of a pathological state, ultimately allowing us to better guide diagnoses and treatments. I always come away from these meetings in awe of the progress other participants have achieved in answering their hypotheses. Indeed, it is often the case these projects have included multiple collaborators, and this is what I will plan to apply to my own projects to progress my research more effectively.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this meeting?
I would advise future meeting participants to really take advantage of the broad range of research areas within cancer that you will be exposed to during this meeting. I come from a proteomics background and to be able to learn about ongoing research from areas of cancer metabolism, epigenetics and stem cells to name just a few was a brilliant experience. However, I would suggest that it can become overwhelming with the expanse of data the talks will present but try to remember that this is often years of work shrunken into a 20-minute talk. I had to keep this in mind as a postdoc just starting out, so as not to feel dejected about my own progress!

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Meeting?
As the meeting had to adapt to being virtual it is obviously not exactly the same as being able to interact with participants in person. However, it was still great to see all of the speakers and get the chance to interact with them in different sessions, even if virtually! The talks really did make you feel like you were in a physical room and the questions and answer section helped me further understand aspects of the research being presented.

Thank you to Jemma for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Images provided by Jemma Dunn

Visitor of the Week: Koen Schipper

Meet Koen Schipper of the Netherlands Cancer Institute. A PhD student in a group led by Jos Jonkers. He is at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for his first CSHL meeting – Mechanisms & Models of Cancer – where he presented a poster titled “Actomyosin relaxation enables tumor formation upon loss of E-cadherin expression in the mammary gland”.

What are your research interests? What are you working on?
My current research focuses on the process of tumor initiation in lobular breast cancer. We primarily use mouse models and cell culture approaches to determine the driving forces behind tumor development. 

How did you decide to make this the focus of your research?
I have always found the transformation of a normal cell into a tumor cell very interesting; especially since a small alteration in a single cell can have such tremendous impact on an entire organism. Mouse models are particularly suitable to study tumor development since you have the optimal environment to study the early phases of tumor initiation. 

How did your scientific journey begin? 
I did a bachelor study in bio-pharmaceutical sciences during which I discovered an interest for courses about signal transduction and how it is altered in disease. As a result, for my masters I decided to delve deeper into the signaling routes frequently deregulated in tumorigenesis and, during my research internships, I truly understood how much we still don’t know in this field and how much there is left to discover.   

Was there something specific about Mechanisms & Models of Cancer meeting that drew you to attend?
Several former lab members have been to this meeting and all of them highly recommended it as one of the best meetings they have attended; and so I had to experience it as well. The meeting also has a nice format with a number of short talks giving young scientists ample opportunities to present their work. 

What is your key takeaway from the meeting?
Discussing your research with those outside of your own field is very useful. You are able to see how they interpret your results and think about potential future directions. It can really open up new avenues for your own project. 

What did you pick up or learn from the meeting that you plan to apply to your work?  
The main thing I plan to apply to my research is to broaden how I look at the effects I see in our mouse model in human patients with germline CDH1 mutations. This way, I am able to validate our findings and identify possibilities to prevent cancer development in these families.

If someone curious in attending a future iteration of this meeting asked you for feedback or advice on it, what would you tell him/her?
Just like the people who recommended I attend, I would encourage them to come and experience this great meeting and venue for themselves. 

How many CSHL meetings have you attended?
This was my first CSH meeting but, if I get the opportunity, I will definitely attend future meeting(s) or a course. 

What do you like most about your time at CSHL?
I really liked the atmosphere of the CSH campus. Compared to most institutes located in big cities, it is calm and helps you to relax and think about your research from a different perspective.

Thank you to X for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured scientists - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Photo: Koen Schipper

A Word From: Scott Lowe, Senthil Muthuswamy & M. Celeste Simon

The fourth biennial meeting on the Biology of Cancer: Microenvironment & Metastasis was held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory October 10-14, 2017. One of a handful of CSHL meetings focused on cancer research, we spoke with the co-organizers, Scott Lowe, Senthil Muthuswamy, and M. Celeste Simon, about the unique aspects of their meeting. 

To kick off the discussion, Senthil---one of the meeting’s founders---shared his vision for the inaugural 2011 meeting and how it’s evolved over the last six years. 

Senthil: The idea was to have a Cold Spring Harbor-style meeting that focused on cancer biology as a whole, a small-meeting version of AACR that covers microenvironment, metastasis, imaging for detection, trials, and sometimes therapies as well. The more clinical and translational aspects have since been removed because there is a clinical trials companion meeting for the first time this year (Next Generation Cancer Clinical Trials). We are therefore concentrating mostly on biology in this meeting, and will probably stay like this as long as the companion meeting continues.

Also, this year we introduced a career session, a talk given by Bruce Zetter followed by a dinner organized by CSHL. Bruce has been giving career talks to Harvard students and Damon Runyon Fellows about topics like funding in cancer research. I’ve heard positive reactions about the talks, so I thought it would be good to invite Bruce here and couple his talk with the career dinner.

Next, we discussed the research developments they’re most excited about: 

Celeste: Because of combinatorial approaches to therapy, we're starting to hear of ways to broaden what’s working for some patients. Obviously, there’s a very reasonable and appropriate emphasis on the immunology therapy right now but, like every other approach, it doesn’t benefit everybody. So how can we combine things in a way that more patients durably respond? It goes without saying that the more you know, the more tools you can bring to the table. But we now have so many tools: It’s not that there aren’t enough treatments, there may almost be too many and we don't know who to treat with them or how to best combine them. By understanding all the different mechanisms and interactions between cells and the tumor environment, I think we can logically design trials that will more likely be successful.

Scott: In contrast to CSHL’s other major cancer meeting, (Mechanisms & Models of Cancer) which originated from cancer genetics, this meeting concentrates on the tumor microenvironment. Here, you get a lot more epigenetics and things that are not simply or directly derived from gene mutations. One thing we’ve seen over and over again, a very interesting and somewhat terrifying aspect of cancer, is this sort of plasticity cells have that isn't driven so much by gene mutations, but is maybe enabled by them to change cell fate. This has long-range implications not only for cancer evolution but therapy response as well. We heard from Cory Abate-Shen's talk, for example, of cells that can become resistant to a target of drugs by changing their natures so they no longer care about that target. I think that’s surprising and a really important result.

Senthil: Along the same lines, a highlight of this meeting is to understand how a tumor cell uses its microenvironment to adapt, and how it dictates or actually learns from it. This bears out in some of the talks we’ve heard where genetics of the tumor dictate the immune interactions. I think this meeting helps bring together these diverse topics and pockets, and then connect them together -- which is hard to do at a large or specialized meeting.

Historically, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows make up approximately 50% of the meeting’s attendees each year, so we were curious about how young scientists benefit from participating in this meeting. 

Scott: Beyond the fact that the vast majority of talks are selected from the abstract submissions and feature new results, this has always been a really interactive venue. People tend to stay on campus and see each other in the poster sessions, at Blackford, and in the bar, so there’s always a lot of discussion. That’s what I think really makes this meeting great.

Celeste: Each one of our sessions is a meeting unto itself quite frequently. For me, I’m catching up on a lot of the latest things that I’m a little bit out of date on, like some of the immunology we heard this year. These are very fast-moving fields that would be difficult to catch up on at more specialized or larger meetings. I think everybody benefits. We’ve got PIs, postdocs, students, and even somebody very august like Richard Hynes. He isn’t an invited speaker and I don’t know if there’s anyone from his lab here this year, but he just showed up to learn.

Scott: That’s a great validation of the meeting.

Senthil: Exactly.

Scott: I agree that everybody benefits. It’s a great meeting to come to if you’re a senior graduate student interested in cancer but don’t yet know what to specialize in. This meeting will expose you to really cutting-edge work and help you decide what you want to do as the next step. There are a lot of students here thinking about what to do for their postdocs, and that’ll be true in the future too.

Celeste: Another thing I thought was interesting: I saw at least two people say, “By the way, I’m on the job market for a faculty position.”

Senthil: It happens very frequently, it’s a continued trend.

Celeste: That’s good! I heard a couple of talks here that I’m going to definitely notify our search committee about.

Closely related, this year’s meeting debuted a new element called “Junior Stars Sessions,” which featured talks by early-career investigators.

Scott: The sessions highlighting young, rising junior faculty seem to have been a success. The science has been great.

Senthil: Lots of work in emerging fields, interesting topics that are not mainstream in some places.

Scott: It’s an evolution of what’s special about Cold Spring Harbor meetings. One reason I like the meetings here is that historically, most of the talks come from the abstract submissions. What you're getting is the people who actually did the experiments often are the ones presenting the work and, in many cases, this is the first chance they’ve had to give a big talk. The general philosophy of Cold Spring Harbor meetings is that this is the place where people get to talk about their work at an early stage in their careers. So in addition to disseminating science, we're helping early-stage investigators make a name for themselves. For me, that’s what I want to accomplish as a meeting organizer.

Celeste: There are many challenges to launching a lab, but one is being really seen as independent. Many junior stars are kind of at that point where they are just far enough out from their mentors’ labs – who are usually pretty well established. The Junior Stars Session is just a great forum I’d like to see more of, frankly. I’d like to see it become a tradition because of the positive response it’s received; people have come up to me and said they thought it was great. It can really be helpful for those who, in another few years, will be coming up for tenure; this can help them make the connections.

Senthil: For students and postdocs to hear a scientist who is up-and-coming, it’s inspirational for them. They don’t just see the big names talking -- they see people who are not too far from where they are being recognized as “Junior Stars.” I think that’s inspirational.

The Biology of Cancer: Microenvironment & Metastasis meeting returns to the Laboratory in late September 2019. If you’re looking for a meeting in the years that Biology of Cancer: Microenvironment & Metastasis is not at CSHL, the Mechanisms & Models of Cancer meeting is a great alternative.  

For more conversations with other meeting organizers, check out the rest of our A Word From series. 

Photo: Constance Brukin