Felicia Lazure, PhD

Aging is a key cancer risk factor with over 60% of cancers occurring in people aged 65 and over. Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) mainly affects the elderly and often resists therapy, leading to cancer relapse. However, we still do not fully understand how aging impacts lung cancer development, in large part because most LUAD clinical trials have excluded elderly patients. This is a problem because cancer cells interact constantly with their environment and an aged lung is a markedly different environment than a young lung in its structure and function. This affects how lung cancer grows and responds to treatment. Our goal is to study how lung cancer evolves with age and use that knowledge to uncover new treatment targets that can be used to develop better, age-specific therapies for elderly lung cancer patients.

Update: Lung cancer is a highly age-related disease, yet we do not understand clearly how aging shapes the tumor microenvironment and makes the disease more aggressive. Over the past year, we found that aging induces broad changes in lung tumors. These changes affect how genes are turned on and off, which can affect how cancer grows and spreads. We also discovered that a type of lung cell, alveolar differentiation intermediate (ADI), builds up in the lungs of older people with lung cancer. To better understand these cells, we created 3D laboratory models called organoids that closely mimic lung tissue. Together, these findings suggest that aging helps lung tumors become more aggressive by changing both cancer cells and healthy lung cells. In the coming year, we will study these changes in more detail and test whether targeting ADI cells can slow tumor growth and make lung cancer less aggressive in older adults.