Dr. Michelle Dawson

My name is Michelle Dawson. I work at Brown University. I'm in the department of molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry, and I'm an assistant professor, studying cancer research. So the Dawson lab is really focused on single cell biophysical analysis of cancer cells and stromal cells that exist in tumor micro environments.

These cells interact either through direct contact, or through soluble factors that are exchanged between cells, and understanding how those factors individually, or together, contribute to the development of cancers. And the progression to more invasive disease is critical, and being able to come up with new approaches to treat cancer.

So we have several projects that are really exciting. And, at this time, I feel like I kind of have to give you explanations of multiple projects because those projects are starting to converge. And we're starting to understand how these projects fit together to solve the bigger problem of curing cancer. One project is focused on tumor organoids.

These are multicellular structures that develop over four to six weeks. This is enough time for the cells to undergo many changes, and those changes include changes in their cell metabolism. Metabolism allows us to, basically, take small molecules and convert them to energy. And so, metabolism describes all the energy processes that these cells use to be able to develop the types of invasive behaviors that we're interested in.

And so, understanding their metabolism is critical in being able to treat cancer. And another project is focused on poly poloidal giant cancer cells. These are giant cells that have high DNA content. And, they exist as small sub populations of every tumor microenvironment. And since these cells exist within the tumors, people have kind of ignored them in the past, but what we found is that these cells can awaken and go from being dormant to being cells that can potentially cause the progression of cancer.

They undergo unusual forms of replication, where they replicate through amitotic division, and so although they're not mitotic cancer cells or cells that can divide in the traditional sense, they can form new cancer cells, and those cells can undergo normal division. And so, that's the reason that the cells were ignored for so long is because of their unusual division was not observed.

But once people realized they could undergo this process, they became much more important. And so in the 3D model, where we look at the way the cells interact over time, we're able to track this population of polypoidal giant cancer cells and understand how they escaped dormancy to form the cells that can give rise to invasive cancers. We use the newer technology in our research every day.

We have the stack of newer incubators, with the automated system for switching carbon dioxide tanks. And, this system is really great, because it allows us to have a sense of security that it won't fail when we're outside of the lab, because it has the stability to switch the tank so that we have continuous CO2 delivery.

It also has an alarm system that allows me to determine whether there's something wrong with the incubator stack outside of the CO2 gas. And so, we can keep our cultures without fearing that we would lose them at a late stage. And since we have these long term cultures, if we did this, the cultures at a late stage, we would lose that whole experimental time.

And so it's really critical to have a system that we can count on like that. So biosafety is really critical in a research lab. We work with a lot of different reagents that pose different types of hazards to the people working with them. And so, we review Material Safety Data Sheets, and sometimes we find out that something that we thought was completely without harm, could potentially have hazards that could pose a risk to the students that are working with them.

And so, understanding hazards in the lab and how those hazards could affect the researchers that are doing the work is really critical to make sure that you have a longevity in the lab and to be able to continue doing the research that could potentially save lives. In the future, I'm looking forward to doing animal work to be able to understand how the polypoidal giant cancer cells contribute to the progression of cancer in a more complex physiological model.

We hope to use our tumor organoids in vivo, this will give us a new system that can be used to study ovarian cancer. And in the context of ovarian cancer, this is a disease that kills many women and has a very high mortality rate. So, being able to come up with new approaches to study this disease is critical.