The American Association for Cancer Research has released its annual Cancer Progress Report, detailing how research continues to drive progress against cancer. The report highlights how emerging technologies and next-generation treatments — like artificial intelligence, liquid biopsy, cancer vaccines and RNA medicines — are reshaping the future of cancer research and medicine.
UF Health Cancer Institute member Christina von Roemeling, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Lillian S. Wells Department of Neurosurgery, shared her expertise on how emerging technologies are helping accelerate the pace of cancer research and patient care.
“We’ve long understood that solid tumors are dynamic ecosystems shaped by interactions among cancer cells, normal cells and the surrounding tissue, but our models have struggled to capture that complexity,” said von Roemeling, whose research focuses on brain tumors. “The convergence of single-cell multi-omics, advanced spatial imaging and 3D tumor modeling is particularly exciting because it allows us to ask not only what cells are present, but what they are doing, where they are and how they interact with one another.”
At the University of Florida, researchers are combining single-cell technologies with deep spatial imaging to understand where immune cells such as T cells localize within and around brain tumors, which cells they encounter and how those interactions may influence whether they become activated, suppressed or otherwise change their behavior.
As shown in the image below, even the distribution of T cells within regions of tumor-associated reactive gliosis can provide important clues about how the local tissue environment shapes the immune response to cancer.
“This geospatial dimension of cancer biology has historically been understudied, but it may be critical to understanding not only why treatments succeed, but why they fail,” said von Roemeling. “Ultimately, learning to recognize and model these spatial patterns could help us anticipate treatment resistance and guide more informed, adaptive treatment strategies for patients.”
