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Title
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Crashing Wave of Cancer
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Description
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Tumorigenesis is rarely a silent event; it is a disruption of biological order. This histology slide visualizes that disruption as a literal wave: the calm, stratified layers of normal oral mucosa (left) are swept up into the disorganized churn of dysplasia (center), finally crashing into the underlying tissue as invasive oral cancer (right).
But the chaos is not random. My research zooms in on the "froth" of this wave, the complex microenvironment of immune cells and the microbiome that crowd the site of invasion. We are currently working to characterize these immune populations to understand what enables the body’s defenses fail at this critical junction. By mapping the immune landscape of this pre-cancer to cancer transition, we hope to identify biomarkers that can warn us before the wave breaks, turning a diagnosis of cancer into a preventative strategy for high-risk patients.
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Date
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2026-01-16
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Creator
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Bruett, Carter
