WHY WE’RE BETTING $1.65 MILLION ON UNDERSTANDING THE TUMOR ENVIRONMENT

Cancer research has a tendency to focus on the cancer cell itself. That makes sense. The cancer cell is the problem. But it isn’t acting alone.

Once triple-negative breast cancer spreads to organs like the lung or liver, those cancer cells begin interacting with immune cells and other surrounding cells. Some of those cells may fight the cancer. Others can help it survive, grow, and establish metastatic tumors.

That surrounding environment matters. And I think we need to understand it a hell of a lot better.

That’s why the JKTG Foundation is investing $1.65 million through 2028 in a new research initiative focused on metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.

The project is led by Elana Fertig, PhD, Director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and brings together researchers from the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, Oregon Health & Science University, and Indiana University.

The Cancer Cell Isn’t the Whole Story

One of the things I’ve learned from working around cancer researchers is that biology rarely gives you a nice, clean answer. You can’t always isolate one cell, one pathway, or one variable and expect that to explain what is happening inside a patient.

Cancer exists in an ecosystem. The cancer cells are communicating with immune cells. Those cells are responding. The surrounding tissue is changing. Treatment adds another variable. Then everything keeps evolving.

If we want to better understand metastasis, we have to look at those interactions rather than studying each piece as though it exists by itself. That is a major part of what this project is designed to do.

Researchers will combine patient samples, laboratory research, artificial intelligence, and advanced computational modeling to study how cancer and immune cells communicate and change together over time.

That ability to study the system instead of only one component is what interests me.

Building on Work We Already Started

This project didn’t come out of nowhere. JKTG previously supported a collaborative effort involving many of these same institutions that helped create what we’ve called a “virtual cell laboratory.”

That work uses an agent-based modeling platform called PhysiCell to simulate how cells behave, interact, grow, and respond to treatment. Researchers developed a computational framework that allows biological knowledge to be translated into models that can be tested virtually before researchers move into more resource-intensive live-cell experiments.

Think about what that can potentially do.

Instead of waiting for every question to be tested one at a time in a laboratory, researchers can model scenarios, see what happens, identify more promising directions, and then decide where physical experiments are most valuable.

Now the team is taking that work further.

Rather than modeling individual cells alone, the new project will combine AI-based virtual cell models with simulations of the larger multicellular tumor environment. According to the Foundation, it is among the first efforts to systematically combine those approaches.

That is exactly the kind of progression I like to see. Learn something. Build something. Then use it to ask a harder question.

AI Is Useful When It Helps Us Ask Better Questions

There is a lot of noise around artificial intelligence right now. I’m less interested in whether something has “AI” attached to it and much more interested in whether it helps us understand something we couldn’t understand before.

In this case, AI and advanced modeling give researchers another way to study an extraordinarily complicated biological system.

The goal isn’t to have a computer magically solve cancer. The goal is to use better tools to predict how cancer cells and immune cells may behave together, how those interactions change over time, and which treatment combinations may be worth investigating.

Ultimately, the team hopes those models can help identify combinations that alter the tumor environment in ways that make it harder for metastatic cancer to take hold or continue growing.

That’s useful.

Collaboration Is Part of the Experiment

I also like that this isn’t happening inside one laboratory. Researchers from four institutions are involved, and several members of the team have already worked together on the earlier virtual-cell effort.

That matters to me.

Science gets interesting when people with different expertise start challenging one another’s assumptions. A computational scientist may look at a biological question differently than someone working directly with patient samples. An immunologist may see something a modeler misses. Someone working at another institution may bring a completely different tool to the same problem.

That collision of disciplines is one of the reasons JKTG has consistently supported multi-institutional and collaborative research.

I don’t think breakthroughs are usually sitting neatly inside one department waiting to be discovered. Sometimes the breakthrough comes from getting the right people into the same problem.

We Need to Understand Before We Pretend We Know

There is always pressure in medicine to move quickly toward a treatment. I understand why.

Patients need answers. Families need answers. I’ve lived that personally. But moving fast doesn’t mean skipping the work required to understand what is actually happening.

Sometimes the most valuable research is the work that gives us a better map of the problem.

How does the cancer spread? What helps it survive? What role does the immune system play? Which interactions matter most? What changes when treatment is introduced?

Those questions may not produce a drug tomorrow. But without better answers to them, we risk spending years attacking the wrong part of the problem.

That is why I’m comfortable funding difficult, early work.

$1.65 Million Is a Serious Commitment

The JKTG Foundation is committing $1.65 million to this effort through 2028. That is real money. And metastatic triple-negative breast cancer is a very real problem.

I don’t know what this research will ultimately uncover. Nobody does yet. That’s the point of doing the research.

What I do know is that the team is asking an important question, using tools that can help them study the problem in a more complete way, and building on work we’ve already helped move forward.

That’s exactly the kind of research I want us supporting. Collaborative. Technically difficult. Willing to challenge assumptions. And focused on understanding how things actually work before pretending we already know the answer.