Audrey Putelo and Melanie Rutkowski, PhD are making strides in understanding how to personalize treatment to individual patients’ needs, but challenges remain.
Deep in the maze of laboratories on the 205-year-old campus of the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville, Audrey Putelo, a fourth-year biomedical sciences PhD candidate, spends her days studying how giving antibiotics to mice with breast cancer — thus disrupting their gut bacteria — may influence breast tumor metastasis. She hopes her research will someday inform how breast tumor metastasis is understood and treated in humans.
Audrey Putelo is part of a team of graduate students studying under Melanie Rutkowski, PhD, associate professor of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology at UVA, who are conducting experiments to understand how differences in the diversity and health of the bacteria in the gut — known as the microbiome — impact breast and ovarian cancer outcomes.
“Thinking about how the microbiome reflects our environment is a more holistic way to think about health and disease,” Putelo says. “Immune responses to cancer are complex, and adding the microbiome into the equation enables us to understand how different settings dictate tumor metastasis.”
Rutkowski’s hope is that, someday, these basic science experiments will reveal a link between gut health and cancer that can be translated into preventive health strategies and therapeutics to reduce cancer metastasis.
Because gut health is specific to an individual and is influenced by a wide range of factors, any related therapeutics would be personalized to the individual patient.
These experiments are contributing to the knowledge fueling the emerging field known as personalized or precision medicine.
Broadly, personalized medicine uses a person’s genetics, diet, environment, and lifestyle to guide the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. In practice, a person’s health care team uses therapeutics — pharmaceuticals, radiation therapy, surgeries, or lifestyle and diet interventions — specifically tailored to the patient’s individual body and disease. [more]