Cancer Uncovered – Episode 25

[00:00:00] Voiceover: We are a resource for learners, including every member of the live strong cancer. Institute’s track educational pipeline middle school to residency. We are a growing collection of interviews, talks and experiences that uncover the myths and the uncertainties of cancer and careers and cancer in order to empower and inspire generations of thinkers and leaders. This is cancer uncover. An education and empowerment podcast by the live strong cancer institutes.

[00:00:44] Kristen Wynn: Hello. Welcome back cancer uncovered. This is Kristen Wynn program manager strong cancer institutes medical school here at the university of Texas at Austin Hookem horns. Today we have a real treat today. We’re listening on strong at school program, focused round table discussion. The live strong at school program was created in partnership with the live strong who incredible free lessons teachers and families can use to empower students of all ages discuss and therefore demystify cancer. Along online live strong at school lessons, the live strong cancer institutes, then invite students to take what they have learned in class to the next level.

By having real indepth discussions with cancer experts, high school and middle school students in this program break up into small groups to chat oncologists, clinicians all backgrounds, social workers, scientist. Survivors caregivers, members of local community organizations and to get the real deal on experiences. It’s an incredible opportunity interested in healthcare to learn more about cancer and to out different career possibilities real world experts. recorded this episode in the fall 2020. When we were still conducting a lot of live strongest school round online here are the researchers with high school health science students in Austin, independent school district. hear four cancer researchers, all completely different stages in their careers that all totally different types of cancer research. David hormo, Olivia Lou, Brittany Fernandez, Ben UMLA. What I love so much this uplifting discussion that this is a super strong showcase for the vast of work is to do within cancer. There’s so many different pieces to research and discover, are also so many similarities to these scientists, challenges, concerns, and passions. If you nothing else from this episode, please hear the passion these individuals’ voices and note that we need. Yes you to continue to create medicine, better patient experiences, better outcomes. So if you’re about this as you’ll soon, hear Olivia Lu say with such emotion, you. Olivia says, if I can you do it. let’s dive in.

What I’m gonna have you all do first is introduce yourselves. A super. Like elevator version of who you are, where you work, what you do.

[00:03:34] David Hormuth: Hi, my name is David Hormuth. I am a research associate in the Oden Institute for computational engineering and sciences at the university of Texas Austin. And I am part of the center for computational oncology. Where we are trying to develop predictive mathematical models of how tumors grow and respond to different types of treatment.

[00:03:58] Kristen Wynn: Very exciting. Thank you, David.

[00:04:00] Olivia Lu: I’m Rongze Olivia Lu, assistant professor in the department, um, neuro surgery and oncology school in UT Austin. My. Is focused on immunotherapy for cancer. So basically we try to develop drugs to boost your immune system to attack cancer cells.

[00:04:23] Kristen Wynn: Awesome. Thank you, Olivia,

[00:04:24] Brittney Fernandez: my name is Brittany Fernandez. I work in the share lab, which is our cancer care and health equity lab through social work oncology with Dr. Lelia Noel and our work really emphasizes the lived experiences of cancer survivors from marginalized communities.

[00:04:42] Kristen Wynn: Super. Awesome. Thank you, Brittany. Ben.

[00:04:45] Ben Umlauf: Yeah, my name is Ben Umlauf I work in. Of neurosurgery at the Dell med school, also part of UT Austin. I’ve been here about a year and we’re interested in drug delivery. So how do we deliver things particularly to our brain tumors?

[00:05:00] Kristen Wynn: Awesome. Thank you, Ben. Thanks for being here, everybody. All right, David, you touched on this. Obviously everybody touched on this kind of in their intro, but what are you currently researching?

[00:05:11] David Hormuth: My background is in biomedical engineering and specifically cancer imaging. And I am looking at. How to use quantitative cancer imaging data from like magnetic resonance, imaging, or pet imaging to personalize these mathematical models of tumor growth. And. Specifically, I’m working with brain cancer and modeling response to radiation therapy. So we have images that are collected before patient starts treatment, and then after they receive some treatment and we’re personalizing these mathematical models to predict how they’re gonna respond at the end of treatment, then goal of this is to eventually be able to personalize that treatment for that individual patient based off of how they’re responding in the moment to radiation therapy.

[00:05:57] Kristen Wynn: What does daily work look like for you?

[00:06:01] David Hormuth: So I usually begin my day off, with a cup of coffee and I typically have a lot of emails to kind of store through after that, I spend a lot of time coding. I write my own code to load in MRI images to process them. I write code to, solve these mathematical models and make predictions or forecasts of. And then beyond that, you know, sometimes I’m working on writing a grant or writing a publication. So I spend a little time each day writing on something we’re very highly collaborative group. So there’s a bunch of undergrads and graduate students that I interact with on a daily basis. And then we also have collaborators at MD Anderson that we work with.

So we have sometimes zoom calls with them to check in on what ways we can kind of further refine our mathematical models to describe what’s going on.

[00:06:51] Kristen Wynn: Awesome. I think a lot of our listeners may not even have on the radar, how much writing and working towards grants is a part of this work in research. So I love every time that is mentioned. How did you arrive in your career at this particular type of research and position?

[00:07:12] David Hormuth: So I went to a small. School in Indiana where I got my degree in biomedical engineering. Um, I always kind of knew I wanted to go into a field of engineering where the things that I’m working on would have an impact on people’s life or possibly their health. And so when I initially wanted to biomedical engineering, I was thinking I’d be developing or designing some sort of device, but instead, I got really interested in the kind of the mathematical, the computational side of things, the medical imaging side of things. So that’s really where I started to focus on in my undergraduate careers on medical imaging and the math side of biomedical engineering. I then went to, graduate school at Vanderbilt where they have a great medical imaging research center there. And I focused on preclinical cancer imaging. So preclinical means. Small animals like rats and mice, poor cell work. And I was studying how to develop these very repeatable and reproducible imaging techniques to study how brain tumors are growing over time. How they responding to treatment. And while in grad school, I started learning about this area of computational oncology, where we’re trying to make predictions of how patients are gonna respond based off of their own data. And that’s kind of how I ended up here at Texas is, you know, here at. UT in the center for computational oncology.

We have this great interaction with both clinicians and Oden Institute has excellent computational engineers and Texas has wonderful super computers. And so we really have great resources to do this type of research here in Texas. So it was really kind of exciting to come here to continue to do that work.

[00:08:55] Kristen Wynn: Where do you see cancer treatment going? what will be important? Um, as students begin to consider this field and, and take their next.

[00:09:05] David Hormuth: One of the really kind of important things coming down the word. Further personalization of medicine for individual cancer patients. Um, right now there’s so many new different types of chemotherapies, immunotherapies, different ways to deliver radiation therapy. And sometimes these things work for specific patients or specific tumors, and sometimes they don’t . And so I think some of the question. Going into that is how can we optimize that therapy for an individual patient? You know, how can we figure out the timing for chemotherapy and radiotherapy to get the best response for that individual patient? So I think one thing that is important to know about research in general is that research is definitely a kind of trial and error kind of thing. Where some days you have really good days where you’re making progress on this. And some days you notice, okay, this project looks like it’s going in this direction, but then there’s some periods when you’re doing research where you really have to struggle through kind of understand what’s going on with this specific thing you’re working at for like, for my case, it’s often. When I’m loading in the data, trying to calibrate these patient specific models, I might notice, okay, this worked great for this one patient I had, but now when I’m applying it to tens or hundreds of patients, there are different scenarios where it doesn’t work as well. And so you have to, uh, really spend some time with digging into why, why is it not working for this scenario or that scenario?

And I think that’s one thing that’s exciting about.

[00:10:28] Kristen Wynn: Yeah. I think students are always really sort of taken aback by how much. Failure is a huge part of, of this work, right? Patience is such a, is such a key part of this work and then let’s jump into Olivia. So let’s start with, what are you currently researching?

[00:10:47] Olivia Lu: So my current researching is really, working on your immune system. And as our immune system constantly protect ourselves from infection and also can protect ourselves from cancer. Cancer is very bad. They grow crazily in your body. However, cancer cells are very smart. They turn your immune system to help them grow instead of to kill them. So there are a lot of underlying mechanisms why this happened and how can we study them, the mechanism to, to active your immune system, and prevent them from, suppressed. By the cancer cells, basically to turn them to friends of cancer cells, to enemy of cancer cells.

[00:11:33] Kristen Wynn: What does your daily work look.

[00:11:36] Olivia Lu: So as, uh, assistant professor, Julian faculty at UT Austin, I think a lot of work involves, um, reading to design experiment to, to test your hypothe. So that’s to read the, up to date literature in the field, what has been discussed, discovered, and what has been unknown, and what’s the novel of your work. What’s the impact of your work to the field? So that takes a lot of, uh, my time and second education. So I mentor grad students and a lot. Fantastic undergrad students. So I work together with them to come up with experimental design, train them, to perform experiments and troubleshoot when the experiment does not work and how to interpret our results and to make a conclusion, the third part work, allow our writing grant to gather. To support your research. So to constantly write grant proposals to different funding agency, including my H national Institute of health, do O D department of defense, all the Texas state funding, actually, Texas is a great state to do our cancer research because we have the specific, separate funding for cancer research. So I think. The three major parts of my work.

[00:13:01] Kristen Wynn: How did you arrive into this particular career?

[00:13:05] Olivia Lu: have very own traditional career path. So for PIs in academia, ULA, you get PhD or MD and then to post however, I got my PhD from city hope, which is a, um, cancer hospital in Los Angeles. And then I did my post in industry at Genetech. Which is, the first biotech company in the us. So I did my poster there with Dr. Nap Ferara I grew up in China, in rural country side, very, um, development region. So I was the first college student in my family and also in my entire town. So I think this part is for high school students, if you have very limited resources, but I think by reading you really open your heart horizon, and also your imagination is powerful, even though your circumstance or your resource, your get is limited by your imagination is unlimited. Then, going into science in high school. When I was studying the genetic coding, I think it’s fantastic about the human life and so I decided to have biology major in college. During college, I lost my nephew in pediatric leukemia. So I was really determined to study cancer treatment. And I’m very, very happy during my recent years, actually, pediatric leukemia has been really cured by the immunotherapy. It’s really so encouraging for all the cancer researchers,

[00:14:44] Kristen Wynn: thank you so much for sharing that. That’s very exciting to hear your, your journey.

I Wanna ask you too, where do you see things going in the future? What do you think will be important for students to know is they’re maybe looking into cancer or research as a career?

[00:15:02] Olivia Lu: I think in future future. There are so many cancers still are incurable, such as OMA or pediatric brain tumor. D I P D is really horrible. We need more young students to work on, to passionate about that, to make small steps in the field, just like the leukemia and it’s years, years,, research from basic research to translational research to clinical trials at each step.

We need students to do it.

[00:15:34] Kristen Wynn: Absolutely. What do you want students to know about research or cancer research? Specif.

[00:15:41] Olivia Lu: I want students to know their possibility to, to develop a novel therapist. So I want one day when people talk about cancer treatment, not just relation chemotherapy, so it’s our job. It’s next generation’s job to develop variety of novel therapists for cancer treatment. Of course, second, you need to have passion for that. you need to know truly, whether you’re interested in that research is not easy. It’s a long journey for female frustration and it needs so much of dedication. So you really, I don’t encourage students to come to my lab to say, I just want to research experience on my CV. So, what I want to say is realize their dedication and love and persistence for the research.

[00:16:33] Kristen Wynn: Wonderful. Thank you, Olivia. All right. So, Brittany, what are you currently researching?

[00:16:40] Brittney Fernandez: So I work in qualitative research, which is a little bit different. I think when research used to come to mind, even in my head, when I was in like high school, I was thinking research labs with coding and like pipetting and a bunch of things that I don’t do. So I really like that. So many people have emphasized already that there’s a vast. Field of research that you can get into with cancer, really what I’m working on focuses on the experiences of people with cancer. And so right now I’m conducting a scoping review of the literature, which is a really fancy way of saying that I’m looking on anything that’s ever been written on lived experience of cancer patients that identify particularly as sexual and gender minorities.

So this. Lesbian gay, transgender, bisexual look, two spirit and intersex identifying individuals. And so building on that, my hope is actually to submit my first IRB proposal in the spring to do qualitative interviews, to record the lived experiences of the community from the community to see you what it is that they need and desire from. I’d also like to just mention that I’m very fresh into research. I started in the summer with the surf program. I was really fortunate to, uh, work with the Livero cancer Institute and do the summer undergraduate research fellowship, and the wonderful, amazing PI Dr. Li Noel, that I was paired with, ended up continuing to become my mentor here for the fall.

So I now work in the lab with her. So a lot of what I’m doing now is still learning.

[00:18:16] Kristen Wynn: I love that. And we perfectly try to find researchers in different. Spaces within their, their journey. Right. So we gotta have a new kid represented here. So I’m very excited, um, to have you speak about qualitative research, I think you’re right. That something that doesn’t occur, um, maybe to our listeners didn’t occur to me, I don’t think necessarily before working over here.

So next on the list I have, what does your daily work look like?

[00:18:43] Brittney Fernandez: So it’s really exciting because I am in the space where I’m basically learning how to do research, but a lot of my day consists of kind of reading papers on methodology and learning about what the research projects we’re doing are going to look like what the papers we’re writing are. Supposed to look like learning how to conduct qualitative interviews.

So once that proposal goes through, I will be ready to help conduct the interviews. And then. We’re actually working towards an opportunity too, to submit my abstract so that I can present at a few conferences, hopefully in spring. But most of my daily work right now is actually on the computer. So I use a, uh, systematic review software to keep track of all of the thousands of papers that I’m looking through for the review right now.

And so I love that, um, everyone has kind of E. The little things about research that they don’t tell you. Like you’re gonna have to read through 3000 abstracts before you can even get to looking at whether or not you’re gonna publish this paper. So, you know, it’s in those moments that it is really important for your passion, for the topic to show through. But even through just those weeks of looking through papers and abstracts over and over for hours, it’s like you start to see these trends emerging, and then you start to see kind of the purpose coming to light of why. Going to be writing this paper of nobody started talking about this until 20 years ago or this still isn’t even being talked about. And so it’s really exciting to start to see those trends kind of emerge over time.

[00:20:10] Kristen Wynn: You mentioned this a little bit, but I’m gonna ask a question anyway. How did you arrive here doing this particular type of research?

[00:20:18] Brittney Fernandez: Yeah, I kind of like to tell students in particular, you know, you could have a wide array of. Since still end up in this position because I started out, you know, I got my cosmetology license when I was in high school and I knew that I was going to want to go to university. So that was kind of a bridge for me there.

But then I ended up majoring in kinesiology and health, which is what I have my bachelor’s degree in. And so still to this day, I have people that are like, what is exercise have to do with cancer? And there are some connections there, but I think. Fun to say, you know, it doesn’t have to be related. I can be interested in exercise and health and I can also be interested in cancer research and I can also be interested in cosmetology, but I finished up my bachelor’s degree in may of 2021.

So very recent grad from UT Austin. And I had applied to the surf fellowship through LCI and previously worked as, uh, administrative a. For our LCI admin team, which got me, I guess, early access to tumor boards and some of the people at LCI. And I started to really love the culture and the diversity in research that I was seeing.

So that prompted me to apply to the surf program. And then during that 10 week program is where I met Dr. Noel. And in the summer we realized that we really clicked in what we were interested in researching. And so I ended up deciding to stay on with her, for this.

[00:21:41] Kristen Wynn: Where do you see things going in the future? Where do you see cancer treatment? And what will be important.

[00:21:49] Brittney Fernandez: Yeah. So I think just like David said earlier, a big part of what’s gonna be important is providing kind of precision care for each patient. So I think that emphasizing medical education to improve patient provider communication and precision supportive care for cancer survivors is gonna be. Paramount to improving the experiences of survivors who identify as PAC, which is queer people of color, BI, black, indigenous people of color.

And then again, sexual and gender minorities that are self-identified in the L G B T Q I a plus community.

[00:22:28] Kristen Wynn: What do you want students to know about cancer research and research in general?

[00:22:34] Brittney Fernandez: I feel like if you’re interested in something, go talk to people, not enough students, generally, whether that’s high school, college students will go and ask their teacher professor, you know, I’m interested in this thing that you’re doing and I’d love to hear more about it. But I think there’s kind of this fear. There’s like this power dynamic and this worry about people. Saying no. Or turning you away? I think in any situation, not just research, it’s not thinking what if this goes wrong, but thinking about what if this goes right? And most of the time educators want to mentor you and they want to help you to pursue your passions.

And so it’s just asking enough people that you find, the one that you were really a good match with.

[00:23:16] Kristen Wynn: That is great advice. All right, Ben last, but certainly not least let’s kick it off with what are you currently researching?

[00:23:27] Ben Umlauf: So my research is focused on, uh, drug delivery to solid tumor. we take a little bit different tact than, than maybe some of the researchers you’ve heard today. And our interest is much more in rather than necessarily developing a new drug. How can we take what’s there and make it work better by delivering it better?

Right. So can we reduce adverse events? Can we increase the maximum tolerated dose? Can we really take away the parts of the cancer therapies that. Really create a, horrible environment for the patients. Right? Can we remove some of those in an effort to increase your therapeutic outcomes?

So that’s obviously a very broad range and currently in the department of neurosurgery. So we tend to focus most of our stuff on brain tumors, brain tumors in particular are very hard to get drugs to. There’s just a numerous. Systems in place in your body that are very, very important.

We always talk about this negative. These systems are very important that protect your brain, but it also makes it a challenge to treat brain tumors, right? To get your chemotherapies, your immunotherapies, really the things you’ve heard extensively about today, actually to the tumor, that’s the kind of space that our lab tries to tries to fit in.

[00:24:33] Kristen Wynn: So, what does daily work look like for you?

[00:24:36] Ben Umlauf: I’m kind of an early morning worker. So I tend to work through my emails. And then I’m kind of a funny professor in that I don’t teach. So most of your professors at UT have some type of teaching load? I do not, but because of that, I can actually still work in the lab. So I walk in in the morning and tend to my lab duties for, you know, a couple hours.

Then I’d come back to my office. Usually I tend to write grants, proposals, papers till lunchtime. Usually then I finish up whatever I had started in the lab in the afternoon. And then my end day is kind of just all the administrative stuff that I really didn’t want to do. So I ended up, you know, sticking it on to end, uh, writing to all my committees.

The real business of science as we say. And then I try to sneak out before all the, uh, employees ask me a hundred questions on the way out the door. So I try to hide, you know, take it back, back door if that’s sort of thing.

[00:25:24] Kristen Wynn: Yes. Sneak away. Yeah. Sneak away as fast as you can. My next question is how did you arrive? in your career, um, at this particular type of work,

[00:25:34] Ben Umlauf: so I also started as a biomedical engineer, had a relatively small engineering school. Uh, I was in the up upper peninsula of Michigan, and then I got in touch with the research group down at the Mayo clinic that was working on vaccines. So I got into learning a lot about immunology and that sort of thing.

I ended up graduating, finishing my degree and went to actually down to Mayo work for a couple of years, trying to figure out what I really wanted to do before going to get my PhD at Southwestern in Dallas. There. I really began to focus on cellular molecular biology, a pretty far shift from where I’d started as a biomedical engineer, but really, really enjoyable.

Um, it was learning a brand new field for me, so that, that was really fun. And then I, my grad school, I started working basically on what we do now. I became very, very interested in drug delivery. I was working on lung cancer at the time, but still this idea of can we take these therapies that people know spend years and years and years on?

Can we make them work better? Right. Can we get ’em through that last final? So that’s kind of my grad school. And then, uh, I bounced around a little bit, and then I ended up in Austin here. So it’s been lovely. I’ve been here for about a year now, due to the COVID pandemic, all that sort of stuff.

I’m still meeting my colleagues. Most of them are, are, you know, I’ve ever actually met in person. So that’s been entertaining.

[00:26:49] Kristen Wynn: Yeah. Yeah, so welcome to Austin. I didn’t realize you are such a, such a new kid to Austin, so welcome, and great work. And we’re so glad you’re here. My next question for you is where do you see things going in the future?

[00:27:04] Ben Umlauf: Yeah. So while I, I do agree that things are going to the more personalized standpoint, I think it’s just the future. But I think there’s a really interesting gap that’s forming and people are trying to fix, but it’s, it’s forming very, I think quicker than the people are being able to backfill it, which is so we have your personalized therapy and that’s great.

How do we, as a pharmaceutical company, as a biotech company, how do we produce a personalized therapy for you in a way that’s cost effective and time effective if it takes us eight months to produce your therapy for a lot of our patients, that’s their life, right? You’re not going to live through that.

Right. So I think there’s this very large gap. The researchers are big on the personalized stuff. We all wanna move the personalized stuff, but how do we actually physically nuts and bolts wives from in both an engineering and pharmaceutical company make that happen?

[00:27:56] Kristen Wynn: What do you want students to know about cancer research and research in general?

[00:28:02] Ben Umlauf: one thing I always tell the students that I think is oftentimes missed, particularly coming, maybe not from the high school, but definitely from the undergraduate is there is an ethereal beauty to science and, and being a researcher. Right. You’re thinking about things. You’re discovering ideas, you’re testing hypotheses, and that’s all very important.

But maybe equally important or, or the other side of that coin is science is a craft. There is a legitimate skill to be a scientist. Right. I execute my assays. Well, I code, well, I am good at doing microscopy. I image things well, so I, I always love to tell the students that it is a nice blend. Yes. You get to think, yes, you could do these things, but you also can, you know, proven and hold your craft, which I think is an aspect that’s not really talked about quite as much, but to me is very rewarding.

[00:28:50] Kristen Wynn: Thank you, Ben.

Thank you so much to Olivia, Brittany, Ben and David for taking the time to share their work and their expertise. If you have questions about today’s episode or you have another topic in cancer that we can uncover, please email us at live strong cancer institutes at Del med dot U Texas dot ed. Please make sure institutes is plural. You can also follow our chair, Dr. Gail Eckhart on Twitter @is spelled E C K H a R DT to find out more about the live strong cancer institutes. You can go to Dell, me dot U, texas.edu. This is Kristen Wynn for cancer uncovered. Thank you so much for listening and learning with us.