In her keynote address at the 68th annual Soma Weiss Student Research Day, Joan Brugge described her plunge into cancer research after she learned that her sister had glial blastoma. She began investigating how cellular pathways and processes mediate alterations that occur during cancer’s initiation and progression. Her lab has since developed a technique for modeling breast cancers in three dimensions so the mechanisms of oncogenic transformation can be illuminated. Brugge, the Louise Foote Pfeiffer professor of cell biology and head of that department at HMS, captured the sense of quest and discovery in scientific research, a spirit that was reflected by the students who took part in the program.
Lior Braunstein, HMS ’10, one of three students who gave talks and 136 who presented posters, reported on thrombospondin-1 (TSP-1), a powerful inhibitor of tumor angiogenesis. TSP-1 is highly expressed in the spleen, he said, suggesting that the organ is involved in angiogenesis inhibition. Working closely with Judah Folkman, the Julia Dyckman Andrus professor of pediatric surgery (who passed away less than a week after Soma Weiss Day), and Sandra Ryeom, HMS instructor in surgery at Children’s Hospital Boston, Braunstein hypothesized that considering the spleen is active in the immune system, the system may be involved in mediating suppression of tumor angiogenesis via TSP-1.
Working in SCID mice, which have undetectable levels of TSP-1 in the spleen, he transferred wild-type splenocytes containing TSP-1 into one group of animals and splenocytes lacking TSP-1 into another group. Braunstein found that after both groups were exposed to cancer cells, recipients of the wild-type splenocytes exhibited an 80 to 90 percent tumor inhibition compared to the other group. The finding suggests that TSP-1 levels in the spleen are, indeed, correlated with effective immune surveillance.
Ruchira Jha, HMS ’08, speaking on neural stem cells, and Marie-Louise Meng, HMS ’10, describing a genome-wide association study of QT interval duration, completed the student lectures.
Soma Weiss (1899–1942) was a beloved teacher and physician at HMS and a passionate supporter of student research.
