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Tumor Mappers THE TUMOR MAPPERS The unique cooperative research model of the Ludwig Center at Harvard is being productively harnessed by the Tumor Atlas Project, an ambitious effort to create high-dimensional maps of any and all tumors. When Peter Sorger set out to develop a progression and response to therapies. It method for mapping the different cells in is also a sort of technological avatar of an tumors, he didn’t expect actual mapmakers idea central to the structure of the Ludwig would be involved. So when members of Center at Harvard: to bring together diverse Harvard’s Department of Architecture biomedical disciplines and their associated approached him one day following a technologies to tackle the most intractable presentation, Sorger was surprised. “They problems of cancer research and care. said, ‘That’s really cool. Let’s work together,’” recalls Sorger, an investigator at the Ludwig It takes a village Center at Harvard and professor of systems It’s no coincidence that TAP originated at pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Ludwig Harvard, which has a special focus “Unknown to me, Harvard was the place on drug resistance in cancer. “The Tumor where the initial GIS”—geographic information Atlas Project fits into every single project system—“was developed back in the 1950s.” we have,” Ludwig Harvard Co-director Joan Brugge observes. “The technology makes The Harvard cartographers’ expertise would it feasible to follow many different proteins prove useful for organizing and visualizing in real human tumors, which is key to an the flood of tumor data that the Ludwig understanding of the state of individual Tumor Atlas Project (TAP), led by Sorger, cells in tumor tissue prior to and after drug was generating. Launched in January 2019 treatment.” with funding from Ludwig Cancer Research, TAP aims to develop a multi-dimensional TAP, Sorger expects, will not only help “map” that captures the locations and transform our understanding of cancer identities of not just cancer cells but also biology but drive innovations in diagnostic the noncancerous immune and supporting pathology as well. The first phase of the cells that contribute to tumor evolution, project will map tumor cells, unraveling their 56 PETER SORGER LUDWIG HARVARD Photo by Flynn Larsen 57 “The technology makes information systems specialists. “The foundational technology that underlies it feasible to follow many modern digital maps is conceptually applicable to our Atlas,” Sorger says. “On our different proteins in real website, you can zoom in and out on millions of tumor cells from different diseases. The human tumors, which is technology behind that is the same one used in Google Earth.” key to an understanding Community building Ludwig Harvard’s model was forged in the of the state of individual earliest days of its establishment, when Brugge and Demetri were appointed its co- cells in tumor tissue directors and had to decide how to distribute the annual interest of the $90 million prior to and after drug endowment from Ludwig Cancer Research. “George and I were in sync from the very treatment.” beginning,” says Brugge, whose own thinking was influenced by her experience co- founding a biotech company. “I saw how well it can work when you have multiple people with different expertise coming together to help solve a problem.” With the new funding, the co-directors interactions with supporting noncancerous saw an opportunity to build a truly cells and immune cells, and pin down the cell multidisciplinary model for cancer research. signaling pathways involved in driving tumor “What we wanted to do was to bring the other growth and drug resistance. The second, people who are really interested in a given Sorger says, will deploy machine vision, problem from multiple areas of science, and artificial intelligence and multi-dimensional then together develop the strategy to attack visualization to combine data from many the problem, so that from the very beginning, specimens, facilitate expert annotation by we would be functioning as a unit.” human pathologists and develop algorithms for predicting the responses of individual In practice, this means that every research patients to specific therapies. team that is part of Ludwig Harvard receives about $150,000 in seed funding annually to The technology benefits from a unique pursue its research. This has helped forge “cooperative research model” that Brugge a community, says Demetri, who is also the and Co-director George Demetri have associate director for clinical sciences at the implemented at Ludwig Harvard. That Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. model seeks to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines at the outset of “Our pitch to faculty was, ‘If you join our every inquiry. The framework is vital to community, we will have the ability to come TAP, which relies on contributions from up with new ideas, intersect in different not just oncologists and pathologists but ways, and provide seed money to get great also software developers, computational multi-institutional, multi-investigator grants biologists and, of course, geographic going forward,’” Demetri says. “Did we get 58 Photo by Flynn Larsen Ludwig Harvard Co-directors George Demetri and Joan Brugge. pushback? You bet we did. But in the end it says the meeting had a strong influence on worked. Remember, this was right around her as a young scientist. “I remember sitting the time when team science was starting there in awe and watching and listening to all to catch fire. People were realizing that the of these senior and junior people just talking translation from basic science to patients is about science together,” recalls Guerriero, too complicated for any one person, and we who now directs the Breast Immunology need to figure out how to work together.” Laboratory in the Women’s Cancer Program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She Brugge and Demetri also implemented a too has become a key part of the TAP and weekly Monday meeting to which anyone tCyCIF team, with a special focus on the associated with Ludwig Harvard research— roles of macrophages in chemotherapy and from principal investigators to postdocs, immunotherapy. graduate students, and clinicians—is invited. The “Ludwig Monday meetings,” as The effect Guerriero described was by they’ve come to be known, are a chance for design. “In some ways, it felt like part of researchers from different disciplines to what we did was introduce people to other come together to learn what their colleagues people,” says Demetri. “It was like a junior are working on and determine how their high school dance, where the basic scientists projects might intersect. were on that side of the room and the clinical scientists were on the other side, and the two Jennifer Guerriero, who has been attending groups were too shy or unable to talk to each the weekly gathering since her postdoc days, other.” 59 The result is a remarkably rich and nuanced picture of tumors. “Before, we had a very unidimensional view of individual cells,” says Sandro Santagata, an investigator at the Ludwig Center at Harvard, co-leader of the TAP and an associate professor of pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Now we can not only spot an immune cell, but determine specifically which type it is and define the functional state that it’s in, and then compare it to a slightly different immune cell that occupies a different space. Not only do you get to really probe deeply the identity and the properties of individual cells, now you also get to see how they interface with each another.” tCyCIF at work tCyCIF is designed to use the kinds of standard biopsy samples that hospitals and researchers have been collecting from Photo by Flynn Larsen patients for nearly a century (it also works with mouse models of cancer). “Our goal was to hack directly into the standardized clinical E pluribus unum workflow,” says Sorger, who is also a principal At the heart of TAP is a method dubbed investigator in the U.S. National Cancer tissue-based cyclic immunofluorescence, Institute’s Human Tumor Atlas Network, for or tCyCIF, which is being developed at which he is mapping premalignant tissues Ludwig Harvard under Sorger’s direction. associated with certain skin and blood tCyCIF allows researchers to obtain images cancers. “We wanted to develop a method containing multiple layers of protein that allows us to get deep molecular insights information about tumors—including their from a sample that is collected from virtually cancer cells and their associated immune every single cancer patient.” This continuity and other noncancerous cells—at subcellular means that tumor samples collected in resolution. It combines the output of completed clinical trials can still be analyzed, multiple existing instruments and reagents as can accumulated samples of rare cancers into a workflow that can scan a tissue collected over the decades. sample dozens of times without damaging its constituent cells. Each scan looks for Sorger envisions tCyCIF as a complement three to five different protein markers. rather than a competitor to other cell- When compiled, the information generates screening technologies. For example, single a composite image of a tumor constructed cell RNA sequencing can provide a wealth of from 40 to 60 “channels” of information. information on the gene expression profile of individual cells. “You get detailed information Sorger likens the process to getting to know on individual cells, but you get no information a stranger by asking many simple yes and about their locale,” Sorger says. By contrast, no questions. “But instead of asking just one while tCyCIF tracks only a few dozen proteins, stranger, imagine asking these questions to a it can interrogate many square centimeters stadium full of people simultaneously. tCyCIF of tissue—hundreds of thousands of is very much like that,” he explains.
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