P R O D U C E D B Y 7 D B R A N D S T U D I O — PA I D F O R B Y P O M E R L E A U R E A L E S TAT E
LUKE AWTRY
UVM Students Contribute to Groundbreaking Cancer Research
BY 7D BRAND STUDIO
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ignificant advances in the fight against cancer aren’t always made by a single inspired scientist; often they’re accomplished by a team. The University of Vermont Cancer Center excels at supporting and promoting team science. Sometimes, those teams even include undergraduate students at UVM.
During their time at "Groovy UV," alumnae Lisa Wood, ’18, and Carolyn Marquis, ’19, contributed to foundational scientific research that could someday lead to new ways of fighting triple negative breast cancer. Both worked in a molecular physiology and biophysics lab run by UVM Larner College of Medicine associate professor Dr. Jason Stumpff. He's one of more than 210 members of the Cancer Center. Wood and Marquis began working in Stumpff’s lab during the summer after their sophomore years 30
SEVEN DAYS JUNE 9-16, 2021
through the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. It gives students the chance to be part of a real-world lab outside of a classroom setting. The experience was pivotal for both women. They had the opportunity to publish their findings in Nature Communications last February; Marquis was named as the article’s first author. “First author identifies the investigator who really drove the project,” Stumpff explains in a March article on the UVM website. It’s an unusual
From left: Sarah Vandal; Katie Queen; Hannah Poquette; Katie Schutt, PhD; Alex Thompson; Jason Stumpff, PhD; Carolyn Marquis; Leslie Sepaniac; and Cindy Fonseca, MS
accomplishment for a student without an advanced degree. “Carolyn also completed important experiments for a related project that was published in Nature Communications a few weeks ago. She is a coauthor on that study, which was a collaboration between six labs in five different countries.”
A NEW PATH FOR TREATMENT? Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in women. There are multiple types, each requiring a different treatment. Triple negative breast cancer, a rare and aggressive form of the disease, doesn’t respond to many treatments. Chemotherapy
is effective against it but kills healthy cells, as well. Currently there aren't many other options. To develop new therapies, drug companies rely on researchers such as Stumpff and his colleagues to identify approaches that might work. For the last couple of decades, Stumpff has concentrated on understanding how cells divide. The research in which Wood and Marquis were involved focused specifically on a cell protein called KIF18A. The lab was able to show that this protein plays a larger role in the growth of triple negative breast cancer and colorectal cancer cells than it does in the growth of normal cells. In other words, that protein could be a new path for treatment. Observations made by Wood and Cindy Fonseca, a senior technician, led the lab to further investigate KIF18A. Stumpff says that, when they see initial evidence of a “high-risk, high-reward” finding — one that might not turn out to be significant — they’ll often have a student look into it further. “If it doesn’t pan out, the student still gets the benefit of having done research,” he says. That happens frequently. “There are a lot of days when things just don’t work,” Stumpff notes. But the protein discovery did — and it ended up providing Wood and Marquis with a basis for their honors theses. The research gave both undergraduates an opportunity to work with international collaborators, as well as a lab team that included a graduate student, a post-doc fellow, a senior technician, an oncologist, scientists from Vermont-based medical instrument company BioTek and two patient advocates — both breast cancer survivors with scientific backgrounds. “Receiving feedback from these individuals gave me a broader perspective on the project,” Marquis says, “and it reinforced that the work we do in the lab has real potential to help people.”