Diversity working together: cancer, immune system, and microbiome

After a much needed few weeks of recovery, I’ve found some time to post about our annual IMO workshop held this year on the topic of viruses in cancer. Our group had the challenge of learning about all of the complexities of the human microbiome and its interactions with a cancerous lesion. The human microbiome, in a nutshell, is the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that live on our inner and outer surfaces including bacteria, fungi, and viruses. The number of cells in the human microbiome is more than 10 times the amount of cells in our bodes (Costello et al., 2009), which means that 2-6 pounds of us is made of, not exactly us, but microorganisms. The microbiome has become a popular topic as of recent, with more than just human-centric studies sparking interest (see links for kittens, seagrass, the University of Chicago’s hospital, and the earth). See the video below for a nice introduction to the microbiome (and the cutest depiction of a colon you will ever see):

The first thing that I learned about the human microbiome is the extreme diversity of the bacterial communities. We have quite unique microbiomes, though they are shared through kissing, similar diets, and among families and pets (Song et al., 2013; Kort et al., 2014)! Further, there are huge discrepancies of the microbial communities that live in our hair, nose, ear, gut and foot (Human Microbiome Project Consortium, 2012). So the challenge to find a project that would address this diverse microbiome and its interaction with cancer in a way that we could test with real data to BOTH answer a clinically-relevant question AND be mathematically modeled in 4 days (what!?) was a little daunting. Good thing we had an epidemiologist and expert in the microbiome (Christine Pierce Campbell), a medical oncologist specializing in head and neck cancers (Jeffery Russell), and an excellent team of biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and biophysicists (#teamFecal) ready to rumble.