This year’s Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences Graduate Research Symposium featured more than 50 research projects. Students shared their findings with faculty and competed for cash prizes for the top research.

The symposium provides young researchers with the opportunity to analyze their data and create compelling presentations that can ultimately get support from research funding organizations, says Jackie Zhao, a Burnett School professor and symposium chair.

“It takes a lot of effort and hard work to … get the data for these presentations. Without that, you cannot have a presentation,” he says. “Students also need to … pull that together into a good story that they can continue to work on — from the bench, into clinical trials and potentially into a new drug.”

Second-year doctoral student Aaron Beaird joined the Burnett School with a passion for understanding infectious diseases. He discovered a mentor in Tara Strutt, associate professor and College of Medicine immunology researcher.

Beaird’s research focuses on better understanding influenza so medicine can develop one complete vaccine, rather than changing the flu vaccine every year based on the disease’s newest strain.

Current vaccines are designed to attack influenza’s surface proteins, which change constantly. Beaird is looking at ways to attack the virus’ internal, more stable proteins to create a superpowered vaccine patients might only have to take once.

Generally, vaccines work by introducing a weak or inactive version of a virus to the body. This allows the immune system to recognize the virus as a threat and remember how to fight it when you’re exposed to the flu.

However, not all of the body’s memory cells are created equal. Beaird’s research is examining the makeup of the strongest memory cells to see how future vaccines can be developed that program these cells to help the body create superpowered defenses against the flu.

Beaird says that the conference gave him experience on the best ways to present his scientific discoveries.

“Having the opportunity to talk with my peers and faculty who understand this research and are contributing to the advancement of science is super exciting,” he says. “When we go to conferences, we are going to have to present posters, and you don’t want that to be your first time doing it, so you need practice presenting.”

The event also allows undergraduates and new graduate students to experience the variety of research happening at the Burnet School of Biomedical Sciences. Its faculty researchers are focused on finding cures and treatments for the diseases that plague humanity — including infectious, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.

“The Burnett research symposium is a great opportunity for our students and postdocs to showcase their research work to their peers and faculty,” says Saleh Naser, the Burnett School’s associate director of graduate studies. “It also allows our new students to be introduced to the ongoing research at the Burnett labs.”

Congratulations to this year’s winners in each of the categories:

Best Ph.D. poster

Anamaria Morales-Alvarez from Hung Nguyen’s lab

Poster: Metabolic Reprogramming of T Cells via GPR84 Inhibition Improves Cancer Immunotherapy

Best Postdoc poster

Jichao Ma from Zixi Jack Cheng’s lab

Poster: Identification of Spinal Afferent Innervation in the Rat Heart: Atria and Ventricles: Anterograde Tracing

Best M.S. poster

Erika A. Serravalle from William Self’s lab

Poster: Evaluating the Antimicrobial Properties of Fungus-Derived Xanthoquinodins against Clostridioides difficile

The medical school’s Cancer Research Division focuses on cancer biology — such as how patients’ genes play a role in their cancer risk, what causes cancer and cancer metastasis, and new ways to use the immune system to fight cancer. Their goal: Discover innovative, targeted treatments that attack at the cellular level what cancers cells need to survive, rather than chemotherapy and radiation that blast a patient’s entire system and cause strong side effects.

“Cancer cells are like every other cell in your body, they need to survive, grow and get nutrients,” says Annette Khaled, who leads Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Cancer Research Division. “If we can target those basic needs of cancer cells, then we have a therapy that not only works for breast cancer but works for many other cancers.”

As the nation recognizes October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, here are five of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s breast cancer research specialists.

Annette Khaled: Tracking Metastatic Breast Cancer for Better Treatment
Khaled’s research focuses on metastatic breast cancer, cells that leave the original tumor and spread.

“Breast cancer, when it is detected in the breast, is almost 99% survivable, but when breast cancer spreads to other parts of the body and damages vital organs like the lungs and the brain, that is very hard to treat,” she explained.

Her lab has discovered a new way to track metastatic cancer cells in the blood, a liquid biopsy, which could help identify cancer earlier and give patients more treatment options.

Cancer cells need a lot of proteins to survive and travel through the body. Khaled has identified a protein complex called a chaperonin that lets proteins fold into functional, three-dimensional shapes. All cells contain the chaperonin complex. But cancer cells have significantly higher levels because, as Khaled explains, “cancer cells are hungry for protein.” In the past few years, Khaled identified the chaperonin complex as a significant indicator of a cancer’s severity and has developed nanoparticle-based therapies to seek out the chaperonin complex in cancer cells and destroy it. Without this protein-folding mechanism, cancer cells starve and die.

Jackie Zhao: Why is Breast Cancer Resistant to Treatment?

Zhao wants to discover why metastasized breast cancer is resistant to even the most promising therapies. That understanding could unlock medicine’s ability to create cures for any type of cancer.

In his research, Zhao has found that metastasized cancer cells disarm the immune system, making therapies like immunotherapy, which can be incredibly effective, relatively inert.

“There are great anti-cancer therapies that work for other forms of cancer like melanoma, but metastasized breast cancer is resistant. What we try to do is figure out why,” he says.  “If we can do that, we can make breast cancer sensitive to these very effective therapies as well.”

Ratna Chakrabarti: Finding Marks to Better Predict Breast Cancer

When doctors treat and predict the progression of cancer, they often look for specific receptors which can act as markers to target treatment and predict cancer growth.

Chakrabarti is looking for new markers or alternative solutions to provide better tools for patient care.  Specific types of breast cancer like triple negative breast cancer, named because it does not possess three common receptors, can be difficult to treat.

“We want to find different targets which can be used as predictive markers,” she says. “Right now, we are working so that when patients come to the clinic, there will be different tools to understand the status of the disease and let them make an informed decision for treatment.”

Robin Hines: Understanding Healthcare Disparities in Breast Cancer Treatment and Survival

Hines, from the medical school’s Department of Population Health Sciences, is fighting breast cancer from a community perspective.

His team found that while breast cancer mortality rates have declined over the last few decades, Black women are still twice as likely to die from breast cancer compared to other ethnicities. That finding, he says, is a call to action.

“We want to ensure that the public, everyone in society, has the best opportunity to have the best health outcomes possible,” he says. “So when we identify population groups that are not having the health outcomes we would like, it is important — and speaking for myself it is my duty — to use my training to do something about these unfair or inequitable situations.”

Deborah Altomare: Taking a Two-Pronged Approach to Fighting Cancer

Cancer cells have main pathways they use to interact with the environment. Traditional cancer drugs block these main pathways, forcing cells to use far less effective pathways.

Altomare’s lab is researching how, through a combination of cancer therapies, both pathways can be blocked, disrupting cancer cells’ ability to grow and spread to other parts of the body.

“Cancer cells build resistance to traditional therapies by finding new pathways once our drugs have blocked their main ones,” she says. “However, if we can use other drugs, which block these lesser used pathways, in combination with the traditional ones, we have a therapy that can be effective against resistant cancers.”

Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s breast cancer researchers have earned over $2 million in grants for their work, including from the Florida Breast Cancer Research Foundation and proceeds from NCAA football’s Cure Bowl in Orlando. While the team is small in number, “we have the intellect, creativity and energy to compete with the big guys,” Khaled says. “Our scientists are original thinkers with new cutting-edge ideas.”

To learn more about the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ College of Medicine’s cancer research.