Resident Member Melanie Rutkowski, PhD, has received an Exceptional Project research grant from the Breast Cancer Alliance. The award, issued to researchers “pursuing innovative, high-impact research in breast cancer,” will fund Rutkowski’s project “Defining How the Gut Microbiome Promotes Lung-associated Metastasis of Breast Tumor Cells.”
The Rutkowski Lab studies interactions between the gut microbiome and breast cancer progression. Interactions between intestinal bacteria and immune cells can modify how the immune cells behave, diminishing their ability to destroy cancerous cells. Rutkowski and coworkers have shown that these interactions can even facilitate cancer metastasis by making some tissues more “hospitable” to breast cancer cells, allowing them to grow more easily in locations like the lungs. Studying these phenomena will help the team understand why patients with apparently similar conditions can have drastically different outcomes and how to use the gut microbiome’s influence to improve breast cancer treatments.