Sometimes, when speaking, it is said that there are many types of tumors and the cells that can give rise to these pathological conditions are even more innumerable, so much so that we speak of a cellular “firmament”. And so, let’s try to define a real astronomical table of oncology, capable of revealing not only the localization of the various neoplastic units, be they stars, planets or simply almost imperceptible points, but also and above all to grasp characteristics capable of guiding targeted treatments, opening up new perspectives in research in haemato-oncology.
This is the ultimate objective of AstroPath, the platform illustrated by Janis Taube at the Alliance Against Cancer Meeting – the Oncology Network of the Ministry of Health – held in Naples from 10 to 12 September, in collaboration with IRCCS Fondazione Pascale.
Astronomy and oncology
It all starts with techniques developed to build large maps of the universe which are however applied to tumor tissues to better understand how cancer is organized and identify new signals useful for predicting the response to therapies.
Everything was born from the collaboration of two scientists apparently distant from each other, who met thanks to science, given that although there do not appear to be any particular points in common between the study of galaxies and human cells, the study methodologies can really be similar. Alexander Szalay, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who managed to define and draw extremely detailed maps of what lies beyond the earth, and Janis Taube, professor of Dermatology, Oncology and Pathology and director of the Division of Dermatopathology at Johns Hopkins, on the medical front, understood the similarity and had the intuition of an unprecedented alliance.
Taube herself explained how AstroPath uses image analysis systems derived from astronomy together with techniques that allow it to simultaneously recognize different types of cells and proteins within a tissue. The operation recalls that of sky maps: thousands of images are aligned and brought together in a single representation. Instead of stars and galaxies, the system detects tumor cells and immune system cells, recording where they are located and how they are distributed.
The future of care
The goal is to go beyond traditional biomarkers, i.e. those biological characteristics used to obtain information on the tumor and on the possible response to drugs. In fact, it is not only how much a certain signal is present that matters, but also which cells it is on, which other cells are close to it and how these interact with each other. In advanced melanoma, for example, AstroPath has already made it possible to identify particular combinations of immune cells associated with response and survival after immunotherapy. The most recent developments also concern non-small cell lung cancer, therefore the most widespread and frequent form of the oncological disease.
What do you hope to achieve? Basically, at least in perspective, the objective is to read the tumor as a true map of relationships between cells, to arrive at more precise tools to understand which patients can benefit most from certain therapies. All of this, starting from two positions that are apparently very distant, given that the observation of the macrocosm of galaxies and the microcosm of cells have nothing in common. What unifies the situation are the study and analysis methods that can usefully be applied to both sectors. In practice, the two experts replaced the telescope with a very powerful microscope. Which will perhaps pave the way for future research in the cancer challenge, also encouraging the creation of a sort of tumor map that can be consulted by any oncology specialist.
