Melissa Geller, assistant professor in the Medical School’s Department
of Obstetrics and Gynecology and CAPS scholar, recalls a key moment
in becoming a clinical researcher. Following the first year of her gynecologic
oncology fellowship at the University of Minnesota, during which time she cared for critically ill patients including those with ovarian cancer, Geller spent her second year conducting laboratory research on changes in ovarian tumor microenvironment post-chemotherapy
treatment. Returning to the clinic for the fellowship’s third year,
“I wanted to apply what I learned in the lab to my clinical and surgical practice,” she says. Specifically, she wanted to understand “what was
happening to tumors early in the course of treatment, despite patients’ receiving the same surgical cytoreduction and chemotherapy, that
predicts the vast differences in survival times.” One of her goals is to elucidate early events in ovarian carcinogenesis following neoadjuvant chemotherapy by studying biomarkers and gene profiles of tumor
collected before and shortly after initiation of chemotherapy.
Geller continues to pursue this line of research as she begins her first year as a CAPS scholar. Geller and seven other investigators represent the second cohort in the University’s NIH-funded K12 program, Career Advancement Program for Clinical Research Scholars. (The first cohort began training in 2006.) The CAPS program provides mentoring and financial support to junior faculty pursuing clinical research.
As a surgical scholar, Geller is allocated 70 percent protected time to focus on her research. She will also work with a multidisciplinary
mentoring team including: Amy Skubitz, Ph.D., professor, Department
of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, Medical School; Sundaram
Ramakrishnan, Ph.D., professor, Department of Pharmacology,
Medical School; Doug Yee, M.D., professor, Division of Hematology, Oncology, and Transplantation, Medical School, and director, Cancer Center; and Chap Le, Ph.D., director of biostatistics at the Cancer Center. The program’s emphasis on mentoring particularly appealed to Geller. “You cannot be successful in academia without a mentor,” she says,
adding that it is essential to nurture such relationships. Geller and the other scholars will meet regularly with their mentoring teams, whose involvement will be integral in their research.
Specifically, Geller’s research aim is to identify early in the course of treatment the alterations in biomarker and gene profiles that will predict response to chemotherapy. “This would allow us to tailor patients’
adjuvant therapy based on gene expression profiling of the primary tumor with the ultimate goal of providing a survival benefit for women with advanced ovarian cancer,” she says. |
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