(Lydia Nicholson | Student Life)

The Washington University School of Medicine received a $7.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Aug. 23, 2023 to fund a new program called the MicroEnvironment and Tumor Effects of Radiotherapy Center (METEOR) spearheaded by Julie Schwarz, MD, PhD, and Clifford Robinson, MD. 

METEOR’s primary purpose is to study the effectiveness of different doses of radiation and treatment modalities, with a focus on treating cervical and pancreatic cancer. Over the next five years, researchers will use the grant to analyze biological samples and use advanced imaging techniques to track images of tumors over time.

METEOR’s goal is to enhance the understanding of how the immune system interacts with tumors and how radiation interacts with the tumor microenvironment. In addition to clinical trials and an administrative and technical core, it includes a training program called METEORITE for radiation oncology residents and medical physics or cancer biology Ph.D. students.

METEOR is not a physical center, but rather an organization of WashU-affiliated staff and researchers leveraging already existing programs and working together towards the collective goal of improving radiation treatments for cancer patients.

The center is a part of NIH’s Radiation Oncology Biology Integration Network (ROBIN), made up of five total centers. Other ROBIN centers are affiliated with the University of Maryland, Cornell University, and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, among other institutions. Each center has a different focus related to radiation oncology.

“[The National Cancer Institute (NCI)] wanted to have specific centers of excellence designed around this specific thing which we love doing, which is analyzing longitudinally collected samples from patients receiving standards of care — chemotherapy and radiation,” Schwarz said. 

Robinson said that, ideally, METEOR will maintain interconnectivity with these other centers. 

“We are collaborating with the other ROBIN centers on these enduring materials. Part of it is cross training across centers, so we get cross pollination which happens much faster with trainees than it does with people like me,” Robinson said.

Because WashU already has a history and reputation of delivering high quality care to cancer patients and a genome center that provides access to bioinformatic technology, Schwarz and Robinson said they were inspired to dive deeper and try something new. 

Both Schwarz and Robinson are WashU professors and radiation oncologists who are involved in organizations on the medical campus. Within METEOR, Schwarz leads the research side and Robinson leads the clinical trials side. 

Schwarz and Robinston both started their positions as WashU faculty members around 15 years ago, and they said they have been good friends and collaborators on many research projects since then. 

More than twenty other faculty members at WashU worked on the grant application. Robinson and Schwarz said the center itself will also involve many more research staff and trainees at professional, graduate, and undergraduate levels.

“We are just the figureheads of this grant,” Robinson said. “The brilliance of it is all the other people below — there are some really, really smart people who are doing really great things who have agreed to allocate some of their time to this particular multidisciplinary exercise.”

Geoffery Hugo, professor of medicine and medical physics and leads the Cross Training Core Lead with METEOR. Apart from improving treatment for cancer patients, Hugo said that he hopes the center will serve as a model for other institutions to make the structure and goals of the project more widespread by implementing similar research techniques and training programs. 

“These are the kinds of programs that people look to outside of WashU and say, hey, this is the right way to do it,” Hugo said. “I think that by setting up our own trainees going through these programs, they are going to be the first generation of people that really have good working knowledge of how to interact and do these new kinds of research.”

Hugo expressed his hope that the broader St. Louis community will be excited about METEOR’s work and get involved, including younger populations like undergraduates and even high school students. For example, METEORITE trainee Stephanie Markovina recently gave a lecture to a biology program on the undergraduate campus that was received positively.  

Robinson said that METEORITE aims to connect more to the other ROBIN centers to help trainees and the multidisciplinary aspect of this project grow. 

“We anticipate sending some of our trainees to some of the other ROBIN network centers, and then they will send theirs here. So we get cross pollination,” Robinson said.

Louise Medina, a WashU M.D./Ph.D. student and member of Schwarz’s lab, described another way METEORITE will work to integrate the different areas of the project. 

“I think we’re going to have workshops [where] they will teach [us] different techniques for bioinformatics,” she said. “They are going to teach us new skills that apply to parts of the project and to our research careers in general.”

Hugo said that an important facet of the training program is a clinical trials “boot camp,” which is a program in which METEORITE trainees can get feedback and advice on proposed clinical trials and methods of analyzing results. 

Schwarz and Robinson both emphasized the multidisciplinary nature of this program, involving a committee of physicians, medical physicists, informaticians, and others who give trainees feedback on clinical trial proposals. 

Schwarz said she hopes that METEOR will benefit trainees and positively impact the community. 

“A lot of what we’re doing is creating opportunities for trainees and scientists to have access to new data, especially using some advanced technologies,” she said.  

According to Schwarz and Robinson, while the clinical trials may have less of an immediate impact on patient care, a long term goal is also to improve treatment plans and outcomes for pancreatic and cervical cancers. 

“[These cancer populations] are historically underfunded, and a lot of that comes down to gender biases and how we allocate funding sources,” Robinson said.” And they disproportionately impact underrepresented minorities and other populations, which is something that Dr. Schwarz is intimately familiar with and has worked [on] for years.”

Medina said that METEOR’s work is especially important because it has the potential to create more accessible treatments for patients affected by these forms of cancer. 

“There’s a lot of disparities in regards to prevention [of cervical cancer], like vaccines, pap smears, and other preventative strategies,” she said. “A lot of patients that come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds or areas where they don’t have access to regular screening present with later stage cancers, and those are the ones that we don’t have effective treatments for yet. So this project has the power to develop a new treatment strategy and give these patients better news.”

Robinson said his work in cancer research and his work with METEOR is motivated by his family and childhood. 

“Dating back to high school, I always loved biology,” he said. “But then, also throughout high school, I had a number of family members who were diagnosed with various forms of cancer.” From there, his career in the health sciences progressed, leading him to this current project.

However, Robinson said that he does not plan to be in a leadership role within METEOR forever, designing his trial so that he can step away as the principal investigator in the coming years,  allowing junior faculty to advance their careers in the coming years.

“We specifically focus money towards junior investigators and trainees, trying to reinvest in METEORITE and reinvest in the future generation,” Robinson said. “We want this to be something which is a legacy that others can do really great things with in the future.”