Looking for New Ways to Slow Cancer Growth

When cancer strikes, it doesn’t appear in isolation—the surrounding materials in our bodies have been tricked into supporting the tumor’s out-of-control growth. An important part of that mix is the microenvironment around the tumors, made up largely of the extracellular matrix, with its variety of molecules and proteins like collagen and elastin.

How that extracellular matrix operates, and why sometimes it goes haywire and feeds cancer growth is the focus of research by Jaye Gardiner, an assistant professor of biology and one of two Tufts faculty recently named to the inaugural class of 28 Young American Scientists by Scientific American magazine.

Think of the extracellular matrix and the cancer as soil and seed, she says. “When our bodies are healthy, the microenvironment—the soil—is very dry, arid. It’s not allowing a tumor cell seed to take off and grow. But in the context of cancer, that environment gets reprogrammed in a way that makes it far richer and fertile, and it gives nutrients to this cancer that allows it to grow in our bodies.”

Key to that process are fibroblasts, a common cell type found throughout the body and the main producers of the extracellular matrix. If you get a paper cut, for example, fibroblasts go to the site and secrete the extracellular matrix to help heal the wound, and turn off when the task is accomplished.

But in case of cancer, this natural process “is now hijacked and permanently on for the cancer’s benefit.” In her lab at 200 Boston Avenue in Medford, which was set up recently, she’s looking to understand how that process works.

She’s also interested in how viruses might be implicated in cancer growth related to changes in the extracellular matrix. While there are viruses, like HPV, that directly cause cancer, she’s looking at how routine viral infections might be indirectly involved in cancer growth. The mutations causing some cancers occur due to DNA replication errors that naturally happen in our bodies as we age. Microenvironments like the extracellular matrix in the body can often keep cancer at bay, pushing those mutated cells to undergo apoptosis, or programmed cell death. 

Jaye Gardiner works with Arwen Mantilla, A28, in her lab. Photo: Alonso Nichols

But that doesn’t always happen, and “maybe it could be that as we have these infections or as we’re exposed to other things, it’s slowly changing the environment in a way that that ‘soil’ is becoming more fertile and less arid,” she says.

It’s because of such out-of-the-box thinking that she was nominated for and received the Scientific American accolade. The 28 researchers chosen, the magazine said, “are breaking boundaries, creating monumental tools to explore the unknown, and answering some of the toughest questions on Earth, if not in the universe.”

Art and Science

When Gardiner was growing up in Chicago, she thought she wanted to be an artist, but then she took a sophomore high school chemistry class with an especially inspiring teacher. “He was also a musician, and would bring that into the classroom,” she says, like when students were assigned to create a periodic table-related parody of the song ‘Stairway to Heaven’—it turned into ‘Stairway to Boron.’

Soon she was taking biology and then AP biology, “and I discovered viruses and thought it was so fascinating how there was something so small that could be so powerful.” It helped inspire her to study biology in college. At graduate school she was in a cancer biology program, working in a lab that studied human immunodeficiency virus. 

While HIV does not cause cancer, it is associated with certain types of cancers at a higher rate than the rest of the population. “I studied the virus and how it moved between cells,” she says. That got her interested in the tumor microenvironment—“essentially everything that is not the malignant cells causing the tumor”—which is her current focus.

As she focused on science, she thought mixing that with art wasn’t possible. But fellow grad students encouraged her to use her artistic skills to communicate about science. She formed a comics venture with two other students to create science-related comics, keeping one foot in both worlds.

She doesn’t limit her science communication to the comics. For the past five years, she’s been on panels at San Diego Comic-Con talking about the science of pop culture. This year she was on a panel discussing the Avatar franchise, and in previous years talked about the Wicked movies and the show Arcane, with “all of the things that are happening in that world and what’s physically possible in ours.”

Now, a year after first arriving at Tufts, her lab is up and running. “I’m excited to actually do experiments again,” she says.