The Colson lab aims to develop treatment interventions through innovations, such as polymer films and drug delivery in the form of antibody conjugates and nanoparticle delivery to reduce the probability of cancer recurrence and to improve personalized cancer therapy. The project I will be mostly involved in is focused on investigating tumor spread through air spaces (STAS) in lung cancer. STAS is a relatively new pattern of invasion that was identified by Kadota et al. in 2015 in lung adenocarcinoma. According to Kadota et al., STAS is defined as the spread of tumor cells within airspaces of the lung parenchyma that extend beyond the edge of the the main tumor (Kadota et al. 2015). They discovered that a majority of cases with STAS-positive tumors were extended beyond the first alveolar layer from the tumor edge. STAS-positive tumors have been found to lead to poor prognostic outcomes, including poor overall survival rates, poor recurrence free survival rates, and poor lung cancer specific survival rates (Han et al. 2021). In addition, certain surgical procedures performed with resecting STAS-positive tumors have been significantly associated with a higher probability of cancer recurrence, pathologists have not received sufficient training to assess for STAS in lung cancer, and there has been limited criteria to distinguish the similar morphological patterns between STAS and artifacts (Kadota et al. 2015). As a result, STAS has been found to be a recently discovered histological component associated with lung cancer, and there is much that remains unknown in the literature regarding the exact mechanisms that facilitate the process of STAS development and the biological markers that are associated with STAS presence. In order to develop appropriate methods of treatment and provide further understanding of STAS to thoracic surgeons for advancements in surgical interventions, further information has to be discovered behind the biological basis and mechanisms of STAS metastasis. This project will focus on developing models of different lung tumor cell lines in the animal airway to explore potential patterns of STAS metastasis. Selected tumor cell lines will be further investigated based on assessment of tumor dissociation patterns. The goal of this project involves defining further criteria that can distinguish STAS through developing methods for investigating the dissociated tumor cells, locating and studying lymph nodules in the tumor, and exploring biological markers that cause the selected tumor cell lines to promote specific STAS invasion patterns to gain insight into the mechanisms behind STAS development.

CaNCURE Research Presentation: https://youtu.be/lRBaSGEvyCY