Cancer Experts Collaborate at Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research

Patients at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center may only interact with a handful of doctors, but behind the scenes, a diverse team of physicians and scientists come together to provide the best possible care.

These experts may come from specialties across UW-Madison, such as human oncology, pharmacology, engineering and biostatistics.

This multidisciplinary approach to cancer care is possible in part because of the working environment at the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research (WIMR).

In this building, centrally located between University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics and the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, interaction among researchers is not only encouraged, it's practically inevitable.

For example, lab space features an open design so that when scientists look across their benches, they don't see walls, they see what their colleagues are working on. This leads to more collaboration, which leads to better research, which ultimately results in improved patient outcomes.

"It's hard for them to avoid each other, and that's the intent," said Dr. George Wilding, director of the UW Carbone Cancer Center. "When they go for coffee, when they step out of their office, they see their colleagues and they need to talk about what they're doing and collaborate."

Bridging the Gap Between Basic Science and Patient Care

On May 6, about 200 donors who helped fund construction of the first tower of the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research (there will ultimately be three) attended a grand opening of the third and fourth floors, which are dedicated to cancer research.

They got a firsthand look at how collaborative science is shaping patient care at the UW Carbone Cancer Center, and learned about advances in:

• Breast cancer
• Head and neck cancers
• Lung cancer
• Lymphoma
• Pediatric oncology

Dr. Mark Burkard, a UW Health medical oncologist and breast cancer researcher at the Carbone Cancer Center, illustrated how WIMR has pulled together basic scientists and clinicians.

His research team includes biomedical engineers, pharmacologists, pathologists and geneticists. Before construction of the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research, they worked at various locations across UW-Madison. Now they're all in the same building, on the same floor.

This arrangement leads to a much faster sharing of information. If a biomedical engineer studying tumor cells has a question about cancer biology, he or she can walk down the hall and ask a physician. If a physician needs a blood sample analyzed, it can be done in a matter of minutes thanks to WIMR's proximity to UW Hospital and Clinics. And the entire team benefits from the variety of perspectives each scientist brings to the table.

"When you have people from different disciplines like engineering, or pharmacology, or the McArdle research labs, they come at it from different angles, so you get new ideas where you find out about a study that touches on your work that you didn't have any idea about," Burkard said.

Dr. Paul Harari, chair of the Department of Human Oncology at the School of Medicine and Public Health, studies the use of precision treatments as part of his head and neck cancer research. He said it wasn't very long ago that removing a tumor from a jawbone meant removing the entire jawbone. But advances in treatment and reconstructive surgery allow tumors to be removed while preserving the jawbone.

Harari's work doesn't stop there. Of equal importance is the patient's quality of life post-treatment. To provide the best possible outcomes, he involves experts in swallowing, speech and pain, in addition to surgeons and oncologists.

"Here, a patient doesn't just see one doctor," Harari said. "We want them to see one or two doctors, but then have all of the experts discuss, and in some cases, argue a little bit, about what might be best, and then present those options back to the patient, so that they feel very invested in a multidisciplinary evaluation. And that's really the hallmark of good cancer care, being sure that the collective wisdom of a team of experts is provided to each patient."

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