New Minds, Expanded Discovery
The newest additions to MWRI are investigating various aspects of women’s health, ranging from immuno-oncology to bladder and pelvic pain, ovarian cancer, maternal-fetal immunity, fertility preservation, and the microbiome. Their contributions will pave the way for greater understanding of such issues affecting women in Pittsburgh around the world.
When did you start working at MWRI?
In 2022 as an assistant professor; In 2019 as a research assistant professor.
Area of Research/Current Project
Immuno-Oncology.
Who are the key collaborators on your project?
Ronald Buckanovich, MD, PhD and Anda Vlad, MD, PhD.
Describe the nature of your work. What do you study, and how does your work relate to/impact women's health?
My research area is focused on a type of immune cells, called myeloid cells, that normally defend our body against pathogens and mediate tissue repair.
During cancer progression, tumor cells secrete factors that lead the recruitment of myeloid cells into the tumors and educate them to acquire a pro-tumor activity. Thus, “good” myeloid cells are now switched in “bad” cells that fuel tumor growth, turn off the tumor killing immune cells, and induce therapy resistance. A better understanding of the intercellular communication between immune cells and nonimmune cells, such as tumor cells and stromal cells, will contribute to designing better anticancer therapies.
What is something you want people to know about your work and/or women's health?
A common way to treat cancer is chemotherapy, which directly attacks cancer cells. In the last decade, immunotherapy, which harnesses our own immune system to fight against cancer, evolved from a promising therapy option to a robust clinical reality for cancer patients. I am currently working on novel immunotherapy approaches that, by targeting the network between tumor cells and tumor-associated myeloid cells, will help the immune system to destroy tumor cells. Using mouse models, we have found that the combination of immunotherapy with other novel therapeutic approaches drastically reduced tumor size and prolonged long-term survival of mice. We are confident to obtain similar results in cancer patients.
When did you start working at MWRI?
October 2021.
Area of Research/Current Project
Chronic Bladder and Pelvic Pain. Current project funded via the Pitt CTSI Pain Challenge: A Bundled-care approach to Chronic Pelvic Pain.
Who are the key collaborators on your project?
Nicole Donnellan, MD and Grace Lim, MD, MS.
Describe the nature of your work. What do you study, and how does your work relate to/impact women's health?
I study the way that women’s gynecologic and bladder pain is approached, validated, and treated. I am primarily interested in the overlap between endometriosis and bladder pain. One in 10 women has endometriosis and it often takes seven to eight years and many physicians to get a diagnosis. In that time, many patients develop worsening chronic inflammation and visceral/sexual pain, and some of the most debilitating symptoms are the changes to their hollow pelvic organs (bladder and GI tract). There is currently limited data on how to approach the complex multi-mechanistic nature of this pain and my current work seeks to use the tools we have accessible to us to approach this.
What is something you want people to know about your work and/or women's health?
It is important to me that people know that 10% of women have a disabling disease of their pelvic organs for which we have limited options — the treatments include excisional surgery and hormonal disruptors, which often have other significant side effects. If 10% of men had a disease that caused debilitating sexual and pelvic pain, infertility, overactive/ painful bladder like a chronic UTI, and irritable bowel syndrome, we would have a Congressional order to treat it like a national emergency. We need to continue to fight for funding and to raise public awareness to study female pain.
Are there any role models or influences related to your work that you would like to mention?
Pamela Moalli, MD, PhD, is always my role model for research!
When did you start working at MWRI?
July 2021.
Area of Research/Current Project
Host-Microbial Interactions in Reproduction and Development
Who are the key collaborators on your project?
Maisa Feghali, MD, Christina Megli, MD, PhD and Thomas Hooven, MD.
Describe the nature of your work. What do you study, and how does your work relate to/impact women's health?
Why do some individuals succumb to disease and others do not? Why are disorders that manifest in adulthood crystallized in the earliest moments of life? These are two of the most complex and costly public health questions, and yet, our understanding of the events that occur during these developmental periods that may contribute to individual differences in health trajectories is incomplete.
To begin unraveling these modern day problems, my research group seeks to better understand one of the most ancient biological phenomena: the crosstalk between ourselves and microbes. Our unifying framework conceptualizes the microbiome and the sum of all substrates produced by these communities as signals that are transmitted, received, and integrated into the biology of its host.
Within the context of maternal-child health and early life development, we view the microbiome and its substrates as 1) signals transferred from parent to offspring, 2) signals encoded by parental experiences to enact downstream responses, and 3) signals that deliver specific instructions to target cells or tissues that are converted into an effect on host phenotype.
Approaching from this conceptual framework, we seek to tackle one of the most fascinating and challenging research questions in biology and the biomedical sciences: how the first nine months shape the rest of your life.
What is something you want people to know about your work and/or women's health?
When we think of the cues that guide development, we primarily focus on developmentally relevant signals that move between cells, tissues, and organs. There is another essential, but currently overlooked, set of signals that are propagated from the trillions of microorganisms that reside in and on our bodies.
Our crosstalk with microbes begins well before birth, and they represent an entire class of regulators with activities that remain uncharacterized. Disruption to this crosstalk between host and microbiota is associated with devastating conditions, including adverse pregnancy outcomes, early life morbidity, immune dysfunction, and chronic disease. How these modifiable features of our biology contribute to both homeostatic processes and susceptibility to disease across the lifespan is largely unknown. We seek to identify novel immunomodulatory and metabolic signals of the microbiome that contribute to health and disease.
We focus on three major areas: 1) defining microbial function and activity during key periods of prenatal and postnatal development, 2) interrogating the role of maternal-derived microbial metabolites as transcriptional and metabolic regulators of offspring development, and 3) investigating the role of the prenatal environment in calibrating the response to the postnatal microbial world.
Together, the focus of my research group centers around one unified long-term vision: a forward and reverse translational approach that leverages clinical collaborations, translationally relevant models, and state-of-the-art statistical and computational tools to develop prognostic and therapeutic interventions that target modifiable components of the microbiota to guide healthy development and prevent poor health outcomes in mothers and their children.
Are there any role models or influences related to your work that you would like to mention?
The communities we serve with our science.
When did you start working at MWRI?
January 2021.
Area of Research/Current Project:
Strategies to overcome therapy resistance in ovarian and endometrial cancers.
Who are the key collaborators on your project?
Anda Vlad, MD, PhD and Robert Edwards, MD.
Describe the nature of your work. What do you study, and how does your work relate to/impact women's health?
My lab is focused on identifying novel strategies to modulate cancer cells, immune cells, and their interaction within tumor microenvironments to overcome therapy resistance in ovarian and endometrial cancer both at preclinical and clinical translational levels.
What is something you want people to know about your work and/or women's health?
The ultimate goal of my lab is to identify novel therapeutic options to enhance outcomes and improve survival of patients with ovarian cancer and endometrial cancer.
When did you start working at MWRI?
I became MWRI primary faculty in August of 2022.
Area of Research/Current Project
Maternal-Fetal Immunity.
Who are the key collaborators on your project?
Carolyn Coyne, PhD and Sharon Hillier, PhD.
Describe the nature of your work. What do you study, and how does your work relate to/impact women's health?
I study the activity and response of the immune cells of the placenta. I am interested in understanding how these cells function in normal and abnormal pregnancies. My work is focused primarily on the most abundant immune cells at the maternal fetal interface: the macrophage. These cells can mediate a wide variety of functions but are poorly understood. My work focuses on how pregnancy changes the function of these cells and how they respond to infections.
What is something you want people to know about your work and/or women's health?
Infection and inflammation are leading causes of maternal morbidity and mortality, but we still do not understand why some patients get extremely ill with select infections. We also do not understand how immune cells, which are present in normal and healthy tissue, are important for regulation of healthy pregnancy. My work takes clinical observations that I see as a specialist in maternal fetal medicine and reproductive infectious diseases to the bench to try to understand disease processes.
When did you start working at MWRI?
August 2021.
Area of Research/Current Project
Fertility preservation, ovarian aging, and infertility treatment optimization.
Who are the key collaborators on your project?
Kyle Orwig, PhD, Miguel Brieño-Enríquez, MD, PhD and Judith Yanowitz, PhD.
Describe the nature of your work. What do you study, and how does your work relate to/impact women's health?
I study optimization of fertility preservation techniques and infertility (assisted reproductive technology outcomes). In addition, I study ovarian aging and the impact on cardiovascular health. Infertility and fertility preservation treatments are often expensive and invasive, so optimizing outcomes from these procedures is important for women’s health. My focus is also to understand factors that affect ovarian aging and how they impact other areas of a women’s overall health.
What is something you want people to know about your work and/or women's health?
Although progress has been made to fund and complete more women’s health research, work still remains to increase diversity in research, including clinical trials. Specifically, the participation of women and people of color in understanding how sex, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status play a role in long-term health and reproductive outcomes is important to developing preventative strategies to optimize health and reproduction. I am honored and enthusiastic to work at Magee-Womens Research Institute focusing on women’s health and reproductive outcomes.
Are there any role models or influences related to your work that you would like to mention?
Michel Thomas, MD, Kyle Orwig, PhD, Nanette Santoro, MD and Anne Steiner, MD, MPH.