Turning questions into cures, UF student Cali Love helps transform brain cancer treatment
Both science and ceramics are rooted in the idea that you’re going to fail.
One day, the wheel is your friend. You’re able to mold the clay into something beautiful and balanced. In the lab, your experiment is going as planned, producing meaningful data that support your hypothesis. The next day, it all collapses. You can’t center the clay. Your arms are tired. Your experiment fails, and you have a dozen new questions and no answers.
This ebb and flow is all part of the University of Florida graduate school journey for Cali Love, a first-generation college student, artist and Texan-turned-Gator who is pursuing the M.D.-P.h.D. Training Program in the College of Medicine and exploring the intersection of cancer biology and neuroscience.
“On the wheel, clay becomes something more through persistence and vision,” said Love, who earned bachelor’s degrees in neurobiology and English at Georgetown University. “In the lab and in the clinic, I strive for the same transformation, turning questions into discoveries and discoveries into treatments that may change patients’ futures.”
Getting to the root of glioblastoma
Love is on a team working to develop targeted therapies for glioblastoma, a devastating brain cancer with no cure.
She is part of the third two-year cohort of UF Health Cancer Center’s highly competitive Team-based Interdisciplinary Cancer Research Training Program, or TICaRT — the only National Institutes of Health- and National Cancer Institute-funded T32 training program of its kind in the country.
“One of the big challenges is that glioblastoma doesn’t have a known target,” said Catherine Flores, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Lillian S. Wells Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Florida, and one of Love’s mentors and principal investigators in the Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy and UF Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program. “After decades of research, we haven’t quite figured out how to target these tumor cells specifically.”
Love is tackling this problem with a unique approach: How can we harness neurodevelopmental cell types to create targeted cancer therapies?
In glioblastoma tumors, Love said, there is a surplus of radial glial cells, normally found during human fetal development. These cells act like a little fire pole, sending projections out that allow other cells to travel along them and expand the developing brain. Once development is done, the cells become normal neurons.
It is unclear why these cells show up in brain tumors. Some scientists hypothesize that radial glial cells could be early stem cells that later become cancer, or they may be a potent tool for brain development but bad when co-opted for cancer spread.
Using the body’s normal immune system response, Love is developing a novel immunotherapy that kills radial glial-like cells in glioblastomas, stopping their spread and breaking down the tumors. To do this, she trains polyclonal T cells, little fighters that serve as the body’s defenders against infections and disease.
Pursuing a cure
T cells have long been used to create personalized treatments for patients, but most can only recognize and attack one thing, like a specific individual’s tumor cells or a unique protein. Love is attempting to train polyclonal T cells to recognize different expressions of radial glial cells, with the goal of helping multiple patients — not just one at a time — and even expanding beyond glioblastoma to offer hope for curing other cancers.
“My hope with this therapy is that, because I’m targeting something that’s so integral to the tumorigenesis, it will work in different individuals and actually prevent further tumor formation outside of the classic standard of care,” Love said.
Along with Tia Monjure, a predoctoral biomedical engineering fellow in UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and the TICaRT Program, Love is testing the immunotherapy using 3D bioprinting. This allows the researchers to take a small tumor sample, grow it in the lab and use dye colors to visualize how well the T cell therapy works with a 72-hour time lapse. It is an incredibly useful test to see what targets the glioblastoma sample best before administering the treatment to patients.
“It’s a really powerful tool,” Love said. “With a lot of therapies, if it works, we don’t know why. But in this case, you can actually directly see, and I think that’s really important.”
This fall, Love will present her work at three conferences: the European Association of Neuro-Oncology meeting in Prague; the European Association for Cancer Research cancer neuroscience conference in Bilbao, Spain; and the Society for Neuro-Oncology annual meeting in Honolulu.
“Cali feels deeply, and she has that genuine drive to help people,” Flores said. “It’s been very rewarding watching her grow as a person inside and outside the lab.”