Rachel Newsome
Predoctoral Fellow, Biomedical Sciences Program – Cancer Biology Concentration
Bayli DiVita Dean, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Neurosurgery
Presentation Title: The Microbiome, Immunotherapy & Solid Tumors
Dr. DiVita Dean and Ms. Newsome’s project looks at the role of the microbiome on tumor growth and after treatment with immunotherapeutic strategies. Immunotherapy, such as anti-PD-1, has yielded lasting anti-tumor results in melanoma and a small cohort of colon cancers, denoted as microsatellite instable colon cancer, but has failed to provide promising anti-tumor responses in brain tumors, as well as most colon cancer models. They hope to use the microbiome to potentially enhance anti-tumor response after immunotherapy treatment and understand the immunologic mechanism of the microbiome after immunotherapy.
Core Standards
SC.912.L.14.52 Explain the basic functions of the human immune system, including specific and nonspecific immune response, vaccines, and antibiotics.
SC.912.L.14.6 Explain the significance of genetic factors, environmental factors, and pathogenic agents to health from the perspectives of both individual and public health.
SC.912.L.16.8 Explain the relationship between mutation, cell cycle, and uncontrolled cell growth potentially resulting in cancer
SC.912.L.14.26 Identify the major parts of the brain on diagrams or models.
SC.912.L.14.27 Identify the functions of the major parts of the brain, including the meninges, medulla, pons, midbrain, hypothalamus, thalamus, cerebellum and cerebrum. Florida Grades 9, 10, 11, 12 Science (2008)
SC.912.N.2.4 Explain that scientific knowledge is both durable and robust and open to change. Scientific knowledge can change because it is often examined and re-examined by new investigations and scientific argumentation. Because of these frequent examinations, scientific knowledge becomes stronger, leading to its durability.
SC.912.N.2.5 Describe instances in which scientists’ varied backgrounds, talents, interests, and goals influence the inferences and thus the explanations that they make about observations of natural phenomena and describe that competing interpretations (explanations) of scientists are a strength of science as they are a source of new, testable ideas that have the potential to add new evidence to support one or another of the explanations.
SC.912.N.1.6 Describe how scientific inferences are drawn from scientific observations and provide examples from the content being studied.
SC.912.N.1.3 Recognize that the strength or usefulness of a scientific claim is evaluated through scientific argumentation, which depends on critical and logical thinking, and the active consideration of alternative scientific explanations to explain the data presented.