Data from the American Cancer Society shows that breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in the U.S. Approximately 1 in 8 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, and 1 in 43 will die from it. Any means of curing it will require better understanding of how it grows and spreads through the body. The latest Short Talks from the Hill podcast welcomes Younghye Song. She's an associate professor of biomedical engineering and affiliated researcher with the Arkansas Integrative Metabolic Research Center. She tells host Hardin Young how she started in this research.
Younghye Song: I wanted to study a major that would honestly get me a job at a pharmaceutical company because my grandfather was suffering from lymphoma back then. And then I learned, hey, you could do biomedical engineering or chemical engineering. And so I did a double major in those in my undergrad. And then when I got to college, a lot of people were doing research. I didn't know what research was until I got to college. And then my interest sort of shifted during college. So I wanted to gain more experience that would help me get into dental school, honestly. So yeah, a lot of back and forth. So I joined the lab that specialized in bone tissue engineering. The lab was run by a professor with a D.D.S. degree, dental surgery. So I joined his lab. I got introduced to tissue engineering research that way, and I was like, oh, this is really fun.
Hardin Young: What were they doing in the lab?
Song: They were basically making tissue-engineered polymeric scaffolds to treat critical-sized defects in the bone. So like if the bone injury gets too severe, the injury gap goes above a certain size that the bone cannot heal on its own. So you need some surgical intervention. So they were making tissue-engineered scaffolds to do that.
Young: And these scaffolds mimic the native bone?
Song: Yeah, in some way — in that they are mineralized scaffolds. So they do contain natural mineral components found in the native bones and other synthetic polymers. It does integrate with the body. So I was helping with the histological analysis of those scaffolds. Once they were put in the animals, they let the animals roam around for a few months, and then they take the bones out, and then they process the bones to see the outcomes. I was sort of in that process initially, and then I got into more of a hydrogel aspect similar to what I'm doing right now, and studying optimizing hydrogel formation to promote osteogenic differentiation of stem cells. So basically helping stem cells turn into bone-forming cells. So that was also really interesting. And I was like, maybe you want to do more of this.
So at the time, grad school seemed like the best way to get into more tissue engineering experience. So I went to grad school and I joined the lab that uses tissue engineering tools, but uses that to study cancer. And I thought, that's just a really fascinating combination. You use tissue engineering not to create grafts or scaffolds that can heal tissues, but use it to create mimics of injured or diseased tissues and study mechanisms from there. So that's how I got into the breast cancer space. So it was a little bit of a detour.
In grad school, I was not studying tumor innervation. I was more looking at how these little vesicles secreted by cancer cells can activate resident cells in the breast adipose tissue, and these activated cells, in turn, promote blood vessel formation that would then fuel tumor growth. So I was interested in those vesicles and how they can affect other cells in the tumor microenvironment and so forth. So I was exposed to cancer that way.
And then in my postdoc, I joined the lab that uses tissue engineering tools but uses that to study the nervous system or traumatic injuries in the central and peripheral nervous system. So it's kind of like being introduced to both fields. And then I think around that time, this whole field of cancer-nerve crosstalk or cancer neuroscience was emerging, but not a lot was still known. And I thought, hey, this could be a unique niche I could carve out for myself as I seek to start my independent career. So I got into this whole cancer-nerve crosstalk or cancer neuroscience field, and then I got to be a part of the AIMRC that you mentioned earlier. And from there, I got to study how metabolic rewiring affects breast tumor innervation. And now that's one of the major arcs of research in my lab.
Young: Let's back up a little bit. Basically what you're doing is you're creating biomaterials. So can you just tell us a little bit about how that works? How are you creating these tissues?
Song: With the biomaterials aspect, my lab primarily uses polymers that are naturally found in the body. So collagen being one of the most abundant biopolymers in the body — we primarily use that, and we can extract collagen from rat tails. So one of the things any new members of my lab get trained on is working with rat tails to isolate collagen from them. So with those rat-tail-derived collagen, you can solubilize them to basically create Jell-O-like structured materials. And in these collagen gels or hydrogels, you can throw in cells of interest. So in the case of bone tissue engineering, it would be the mesenchymal stem cells that you can turn into bone-forming cells. Or in the case of cancer, it could be cancer cells and other cells in the resident tissues called stromal cells, if you want to look at the interactions between the two. And to study neurons, we also throw in some neurons into the gels.
That was Younghye Song speaking with Hardin Young. You can hear their full conversation on the Short Talks from the Hill podcast.
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