Graduate student’s research goal: Improve outcomes for brain cancer patients
A Jeanine L. Matte Fellowship will help advance Samantha Howerton’s research into personalized therapies for glioblastoma.
Translational biology, medicine, and health doctoral student Samantha Howerton’s current cancer research is designed to inform patient-specific treatments for glioblastoma, an aggressive and deadly brain cancer. Photo by Clayton Metz for Virginia Tech.
As an undergraduate studying molecular biology at Concord University in West Virginia, Samantha Howerton researched circadian proteins and tumor invasion mechanisms in choriocarcinoma, a rare but fast-growing cancer that can form in the placenta during pregnancy.
Now a doctoral student in Virginia Tech’s Translational Biology, Medicine and Health Graduate Program, Howerton is this year’s recipient of the Jeanine L. Matte Fellowship through the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC. The fellowship will support her research into glioblastoma, a deadly form of brain cancer.
Graduate school was not her first introduction to Roanoke. In 2019 Howerton was a summer undergraduate research fellow at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, where she trained with Assistant Professor Samy Lamouille. The Lamouille lab focuses on novel therapies targeting cellular mechanisms that contribute to cancer metastasis.
During the fellowship and in graduate school rotations, Howerton built on her research into cancer biology. She studied cancer cell plasticity in glioblastoma with Lamouille, investigated related mechanisms in colorectal cancer, and gained skills in advanced imaging and wet lab techniques.
In Professor Jennifer Munson’s lab, where she is conducting her doctoral research, she uses complex in vitro models to replicate patient characteristics in the tumor microenvironment. The Munson lab studies the consequences of fluid flow on the tumor microenvironment in cancers and how fluid flow affects disease progression and treatment response.
“My graduate work seeks to identify patient-specific factors in the tumor microenvironment that predict a favorable response to candidate therapies targeting glioma invasion,” Howerton said. “My doctoral research is the culmination of these topics applied to glioblastoma, but with a distinct focus on informing personalized therapy.”
The fellowship will help her toward her goal of establishing an independent academic laboratory by supporting her lab research, conference attendance, and publications related to her findings. It supported her recent publication in the Journal of Visualized Experiments outlining six fundamental steps for assembling the patient model, one that can be easily adopted by others investigating the influence of the tumor microenvironment on disease progression and therapeutic response.
The $10,000 fellowship is made possible thanks to the generosity of Virginia Tech alumna Jeanine L. Matte. The gift prioritizes novel approaches to unsolved questions in neuroscience research, particularly those that accelerate the pace of brain research and its translation to public health applications.
