University of Wisconsin–Madison Partnerships Offer Hope
University of Wisconsin–Madison Carbone Cancer Center doctors are helping find treatments that work better for patients.
Sponsored by: University of Wisconsin–Madison
At the University of Wisconsin–Madison Carbone Cancer Center in Madison, WI, powerful research collaborations are helping make cancer treatment more precise and personalized.
Two such pursuits, led by Mark Burkard, a medical oncologist at UW Health and professor at UW–Madison, and Melissa Skala, an imaging investigator with the Morgridge Institute for Research, are using DNA technology and advanced imaging to find the absolute best treatment for each patient.
The Carbone Cancer Center is a key part of a thriving health care environment in the Madison area. It is the first cancer research center in the United States founded by a university and conducts more than $100 million in research studies annually.
Cancer treatment is based on several factors, including which drugs are most effective and how severe side effects will be. It can take weeks to determine if a patient is responding well to treatment or needs a different approach.
“Cancers are hard to treat because they’re inherently part of a person,” says Burkard. “Something additionally happened that turned a healthy cell into cancer. If you want to find what’s driving an individual person’s cancer, you have to test the tumor itself.”
To better understand what treatments will work best for each patient, scientists are using organoids, small clusters of cells that function like a “tumor in a dish,” to better replicate the disease environment, according to Skala. The Skala Lab uses novel imaging technologies to monitor treatment responses across scores of organoids generated from a patient. This allows them to identify which drug combinations are most effective at killing cancer with the fewest side effects.
Skala credits much of their work to the wonderful collaborations with people at UW–Madison like Burkard and Dustin Deming, also a medical oncologist, who developed the Precision Medicine Molecular Tumor Board at Carbone. Through their services, genomic reports are generated from patients’ own tumor biopsy to inform care decisions.
“I like to think of them as a brain trust, all these smart people around a table thinking about what could be best for a patient based on their genomic report,” Skala says.
University of Wisconsin–Madison Carbone Center Improves Patient Outcomes
The Burkard Lab uses DNA sequencing technologies to answer a common patient question: “Now that the treatments are done, is my cancer gone?”
Cancer can result in distant recurrence, when metastatic disease develops in another part of the body many years later. Burkard and his team are working on a new technology called minimal residual disease detection, which detects DNA that’s circulating in the bloodstream.
Skala and Burkard both agree that the most hopeful aspect to their work is the people – from stories of patients and their fight against disease, and thoughtful collaborators working hard toward better solutions.
They represent just two of the more than 115 oncologists and surgeons at Carbone, which sees 30,000 cancer patients each year.
“I’m inspired by people trying new things that you wouldn’t have thought would be blended, like engineering and oncology,” says Skala.
Burkard adds: “I’m inspired by my patients who are living in unexpected ways. And it’s humbling every day to deal with this disease and to work with patients and to learn more.”
