VT’s Fralin team hopes ocean current models may inform cancer treatments.
Remember that story that made international news, where thousands and thousands of rubber ducks got dumped into the Pacific Ocean? In 1992, the container ship they were traveling on was caught in a storm, which toppled the ship’s cargo and sent nearly 30,000 of the little bath-time play toys to bob in the Pacific for eternity like Wilson, or wash up on shores around the globe.
Most of us filed that story in our mind’s department of curiosities, ripe for anecdotal cocktail party chit-chat and watercooler banter. But in the world’s more erudite circles, it created a rare opportunity for great minds who took that seemingly benign story and developed lessons using data on ocean currents to predict—with a high degree of accuracy—when and where the ducks would wash ashore.
Enter Dr. Jennifer Munson, the director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute Cancer Research Group at Virginia Tech. She and her team at the eponymously named Munson Lab study tumor microenvironment in cancers, including glioblastoma, the deadliest form of brain cancer.
The rubber duck lessons inspired Munson’s biotech spinoff based on fluid-flow research using parallels between oceanographers’ predictions on the floating ducks and her team’s work in mapping fluid flow to predict the spread of glioblastoma in adults. Called Cairina—the name is drawn from the Latin genus for the Muscovy duck—the biotech’s goal is to improve cancer treatment.
“We need better treatments for patients facing complex and hard-to-treat cancers,” says Munson, who is also an associate professor with the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics and a co-director of the Virginia Tech Cancer Research Alliance. “The five-year survival rate [for glioblastoma] is just under seven percent. We want to provide oncologists and neurosurgeons with a roadmap for an individual patient’s tumor microenvironment so that they can offer more targeted therapies.”
Munson and her team are some of the pioneers behind the burgeoning field of fluid-flow research. Brain cancer invades in distinct patterns that correlate to fluid flow, a process of fluid ebbing and increasing in between cancer cells in the brain tissue, especially along the advancing borders of the tumor. This part of the tumor is important to examine, given its ability to interact with other brain matter and tendency to evade treatment. Munson believes that fluid flow can determine the ways that tumors respond to drug therapies.
In surgeries to treat brain cancer, doctors sometimes remove both the tumors and surrounding tissue where the cancer may have spread. With noninvasive MRI and mathematical modeling to map fluid flow, the Cairina team hopes to better predict these areas where cancer is spreading and growing. The aim is for doctors to use the team’s tools to target at-risk tissue more effectively.
Beyond cancer, fluid flow is also important to healthy functioning of other tissues and contributes to how the body responds to other diseases. The lab is working on applying its findings to better understand immunity, aging, and women’s health.
“Our eventual goal will be to partner with imaging device companies that make the MRIs and integrate it directly into their software,” says Caleb Stine, a senior research associate in the Munson Lab. The Cairina team is commercializing their years of research. “Our business is predicting where tumors are going to progress,” he continues. “It’s not something that’s been possible before.”
This article originally appeared in our December 2024 issue.
