From Frogs to Algorithms: The Unlikely Duo Rewriting Breast Cancer Research

What happens when a cancer biologist and a mathematician become research partners?

In this episode of All Things Cancer, Dr. Lisa Coussens and Dr. Elana Fertig sit down to talk about the unlikely collaboration transforming how we understand breast cancer. Lisa's path wound through art school, marine biology, and an early stint at Genentech before she became a leading cancer biologist. Elana came to science through a love of puzzles and math, eventually applying data science to weather prediction before turning her tools toward cancer research.

Funded by an NFCR grant that encouraged cross-disciplinary partnerships, the two built a collaboration Lisa describes as "like a marriage" — one that combined enormous, complex datasets with the computational tools to make sense of them. They discuss what they found when combining four different anti-cancer therapies in a breast cancer model, why basic science funding matters now more than ever, and what AI can — and can't — realistically do for cancer treatment.