Graduate Cancer Community @ Illinois Presents: Dr. John Katzenellenbogen
12:00-1:00 PM, Thursday, February 12
Medical Sciences Building Auditorium

Breast Cancer: Probing a Hormone-Regulated Cancer to Understand and Predict Why Targeted Therapies Often Fail

It was recognized by Sir George Beatson more than a century ago that some hormonal substance from the ovary was driving many breast cancers. This led to the use of ovariectomy as the first “targeted therapy” for any cancer, which proved remarkably successful but only in about one-third of the cases. Despite many advances over the past 100 years in our understanding the nature of cancer and the means by which some cancers are hormone regulated, however, we are still trying to find better ways to identify that third of breast cancer patients who are most likely to respond to the many types of endocrine therapy now available for breast cancer. From this historical perspective, I will describe the discovery of steroid hormone receptors, including the estrogen receptor, the development of anti-estrogens and aromatase inhibitors, the methods for assessing the potential responsiveness of breast cancers to endocrine therapies, and the modes of resistance to these therapies. I will present my own work on developing ways to image receptors and receptor function in breast tumors by positron emission tomography.

Lunch will be provided for seminar attendees.

Seminar flyer (PDF): gCC@I – John Katzenellenbogen

Graduate Cancer Community @ Illinois Presents: Dr. Michael Oelze
12:00-1:00 PM, Tuesday, January 20
Medical Sciences Building Auditorium

Emerging Ultrasound Applications for Cancer:
From Diagnosing Cancer to Monitoring of Therapy to Novel Cancer Therapeutics

Ultrasound has traditionally been considered an imaging modality characterized by high spatial resolution but low contrast. Conventional ultrasonic imaging may be sensitive to the detection of anomalous tissue features, but the ability to classify these tissue features often lacks specificity. As a result, a large number of biopsies of tissues based on suspicious image findings are performed each year with a vast majority of these biopsies resulting in a negative finding. However, recent advances in ultrasound have emerged which can improve both diagnostic and therapy applications.

Quantitative ultrasound (QUS) imaging techniques have been developed that have improved the specificity of imaging by providing new sources of image contrast with specific numbers related to tissue state. QUS imaging can encompass a wide variety of techniques including spectral-based parameterization, elastography, flow estimation and envelope statistics. Spectral-based techniques include the estimation of the backscatter coefficient, estimation of attenuation, and estimation of scatterer properties such as the correlation length associated with an effective scatterer size and the concentration of scatterers. Envelope statistics include the estimation of the number density of scatterers and quantification of coherent to incoherent signals produced from the tissue. Successful applications demonstrating the ability of QUS to improve medical diagnostics include cancer detection and classification of solid tumors in the breast or thyroids, detection of micrometastases in lymph nodes and monitoring and assessment of therapy in solid tumors.

Ultrasound can also be focused on tumor volumes and the energy of focused ultrasound used to target treatment of tumors and enhance the treatment of tumors when combined with conventional therapies (i.e., radiation, chemotherapy and hyperthermia). Ultrasound-activated microbubbles can be targeted to tumor vasculature and their destruction associated with tumor cell signaling responses for apoptosis. Combining ultrasound-activated microbubbles with traditional cancer therapies results in significant and synergistic enhancements of therapy response. In our research tumors treated with ultrasound-activated microbubbles followed by hyperthermia have been demonstrated to result in an enhanced tumor kill.

Lunch will be provided for seminar attendees.

Seminar flyer (PDF): gCC@I – Michael Oelze

Graduate Cancer Community @ Illinois Presents: Dr. David Kranz
12:00-1:00 PM, Tuesday, December 2
Medical Sciences Building Auditorium

Engineering T Cells for Cancer Immunotherapies

In the past several years various academic medical centers have conducted clinical trials involving adoptive T cell therapies of cancer. The early successes have engendered great enthusiasm for the approach, prompting the founding
of biotechnology companies and large investments from both the pharmaceutical industry and venture firms. Our lab works on both the basic mechanisms involved in T cell recognition of potential cancer antigens, and on engineering the T cell receptors that are the key recognition molecules. In this presentation I will review the recent
discoveries that form the basis for the excitement about T-cell based cancer therapies, and I will describe our lab’s efforts to engineer T cells that are improved in their ability to
destroy cancer cells.

Lunch will be provided for seminar attendees.

Seminar flyer (PDF): gCC@I – David Kranz

Graduate Cancer Community @ Illinois Presents: Dr. Elizabeth Jeffery
12:00-1:00 PM, Tuesday, November 4
Medical Sciences Building Auditorium

The How and the Why of Decreasing Cancer Risk with Brassica Vegetables

Epidemiological studies suggest that as few as 3-5 servings a week of broccoli or related brassica vegetables can decrease risk for many cancers by as much as 50%. The mechanisms of action of the effective bioactive components within brassica, the isothiocyanates, have been studied in cell culture, animals and man – and inclusion of brassica may be the single most effective health-promoting change that one can make to one’s diet. The greatest challenge is to ensure that the isothiocyanates are available for absorption, since these highly reactive compounds have a short half-life. In the plant, precursors are bound through a sulfur to glucose, making inactive, stable compounds termed glucosinolates. Studies reveal that human tissue contains no thiohydrolase enzymes and therefore cannot break the sulfur bond. In contrast, the plant contains a thiohydrolase enzyme, myrosinase, able to effectively release bioactive isothiocyanates – but as with many enzymes, myrosinase is heat sensitive and can be lost during food preparation. Recent studies have focused on the gut microbiome, which appears to have only a little activity, but may prove to be more effective than originally understood.

Graduate Cancer Community @ Illinois Presents: Dr. Jian Ma
Tuesday, October 14
Medical Sciences Building Auditorium

New methods for understanding the complexity of cancer genomes

The rapid advancement in ultra high-throughput DNA sequencing
technologies underlines the urgent need for more innovative computational
research in modern biology for generating, analyzing, and understanding
massive amount of genomic data to develop and evaluate biological
hypotheses. The long-term research goal of this to understand how
phenotype (at the cellular and organism levels) is generated from genotype
and to shed new light on disease mechanisms, such as cancer. The
interdisciplinary work of Dr. Ma’s lab combines genomics, computational
innovation, engineering principles, and medical sciences. His lab develops
novel computational methods to explore the human genome, integrating
comparative genomics data to elucidate cross-species differences and
within-species variation and their associations with disease. His lab also
develops new systems biology approaches to identifying key genetic
variants in cancer development and progression using high-throughput next-
generation sequencing technologies.