Q: What practice challenges have you faced in your career?
First, being a physician-scientist. It’s challenging to be either a physician alone or to be a researcher alone. And trying to do both includes the challenges of both individual worlds. It just takes more time to get all the prerequisite training. And second, there are just challenges with getting the opportunities to contribute in the ways that you want — to get the research funding, to get the papers out, things like that.
Q: Tell me about the work you’ve been doing in your lab to develop microbiome-based strategies for preventing and treating cancer.
The microbiome presents several opportunities when it comes to cancer prevention. One is identifying markers of cancer risk, or of general good health down the line. Some of those biomarkers could — potentially — feed directly into personalized risk assessment and maybe even inform a future screening strategy. The second opportunity the microbiome presents is if we identify a microbe that influences your cancer risk, can we then understand and exploit, or utilize, that mechanism to mitigate cancer risk in the future? Our lab has done work looking at subspecies levels of microbes that track with health or cancer. We’ve done some work to identify what these subspecies groupings are and have identified some links to certain precancerous changes in the colon. We think that there’s an opportunity here for future interventions.
Q: Have you published other papers?
We recently published another paper describing how some microbes can interact with a tumor suppressor gene and are influenced in a sex-biased manner to drive tumorigenesis in a mouse model. We think, based on what we’re seeing in human data, that there may be some relationships and we’re exploring that now as well.
Q: What is your vision for the future in GI, and in your career?
The vision that I have is to create clinical tools that can expand our reach and our effectiveness and cancer prevention. I think that there are opportunities for leveraging microbiome research to accomplish this. And one outcome I could imagine is leveraging some of these insights to expand noninvasive screening at even earlier ages than we do now. I mean, we just dialed back the recommended age for colonoscopy for average risk individuals to 45. But I could envision a future in which noninvasive screening starts earlier, in which the first stool-based tests that we deploy to assess personalized risk are used in the pediatric clinic.
Lightning Round
Texting or talking?
Talking
Favorite city in the United States besides the one you live in?
St. Louis
Cat or dog person?
Both
If you weren’t a GI, what would you be?
Musician
Best place you went on vacation?
Borneo
Favorite sport?
Soccer
Favorite ice cream?
Cashew-based salted caramel
What song do you have to sing along with when you hear it?
Sweet Child of Mine
Favorite movie or TV show?
25th Hour or Shawshank Redemption
Optimist or Pessimist?
Optimist
