VCU Massey Cancer Center develops new tool to identify treatment options for ‘hard-to-treat’ cancers

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) -- Researchers at the VCU Massey Cancer Center have announced that a new tool could help clinicians understand the complex relationships between cancer cells and surrounding cells.

According to the Massey Center, the development of the new computational tool "Vesalius," could lead to potential discoveries regarding the development of hard-to-treat cancers.

Findings from a new study were published Aug. 21 in Nature Communications, and could help guide the identification of predictive biomarkers for multiple cancers and can also better inform the effectiveness of different treatment options based on individuals' specific type of disease.

Professor and member of the Developmental Therapeutics research program at Massey, Rajan Gogna and team collaborators said their goal was to interpret extensive amounts of data in a meaningful way.

"With Vesalius, we are using artificial intelligence to find the spatial patterns in the whole tissue architecture among patients who respond to therapy and those who don't... It's creating a territory of informational domain," Gogna said.

According to the Massey Center, the research team's approach is to analyze the whole tissue rather than individual parts due to the dormant nature of cancer cells.

Cancer cells typically live alongside surrounding cells for several years in patients and will inevitably influence each other, according to researchers.

"Take a husband and wife who have been married for 20 years," Gogna said. "If you are meeting with either one of them individually, can you see the influence of the other partner somewhere in your interaction?"

"A fibroblast -- a type of cell involved in the production of connective tissue -- is not only interacting with a cancer cell," Gogna continued. "These cells are sitting with their neighbors from the time the cancer originates. So, to treat them as individual cells is wrong. They are influenced partners."

Since the creation of Vesalius, it has been primarily tested on breast, colon and ovarian cancers; however, researchers say that there is a potential to apply the tool to all cancers in the future.

In order to track significant amounts of data regarding the influential relationships between cancer cells and their surrounding cells, researchers said, the team needed a tool that could not only store that data but also help draw meaning from it.

"The data is getting more and more vast, and there's a great need to make sense of that data, that's why we started working on Vesalius six years ago, you have to consolidate it," Gogna said.

According to the team at the Massey Center, by examining cancer cells, T cells and macrophages as a network of interacting cells, researchers can begin the process to identify patterns that emerge in those cancer samples, refine their treatment protocols and gain confidence in the treatments they offer patients.

"Artificial intelligence like Vesalius will have a significant impact on the future of cancer research and patient outcomes because of the scientific wisdom of researchers like Dr. Rajan Gogna," said co-author, director and Lipman Chair in Oncology at Massey, Robert A. Winn.

"Massey continues to close the gap with tools like Vesalius leading to better health outcomes and reducing the cancer burden for all," Winn added.