Dr. Anna Halama, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Research in Physiology & Biophysics, Medical Education Division, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, speaks to Middle East Health about her research and the potential for -omics approaches to improve healthcare outcomes for patients.
Dr. Halama joined Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) as a postdoctoral fellow in 2013 shortly after she had gained her Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany, where she obtained in-depth knowledge and skills in the field of metabolomics. Since establishing her research lab in 2019, she has led a multidisciplinary team focused on metabolic dysregulations in complex diseases, particularly cancer. She is dedicated to advancing precision medicine through integrative omics approaches with special focus on the implementation of metabolomics into the clinical pipeline. In her study of breast cancer patients, Dr. Halama is aiming to assess tumor metabotypes and their role in resistance to standard of care treatment approaches. Her work has been supported by Qatar National Research Fund and published in leading journals such as Nature Communications, Clinical & Experimental Metastasis, and Cancer Letters, contributing to advancements in precision medicine and cancer metabolism. In addition to her research, Dr. Halama is passionate about educating the next generation of clinicians and scientists.
Middle East Health: Why has omics profiling emerged as such a promising and exciting area in biomedical research?
Dr. Halama: To give an analogy, moving from the traditional clinical chemistry method to an omics approach for blood tests will be like going from a very old camera with low resolution to a modern, high-resolution camera that can give us a far more precise, detailed and comprehensive picture of reality. For example, we do not yet have a good blood test to diagnose a disease like breast cancer, so we must rely on mammograms and biopsies, which take longer and can be more uncomfortable for patients. With genomics we can check for genetic mutations that are known to predispose people to breast cancer, but this does not allow us to check for the actual existence of a malignancy. However, if we can take a multiomics approach and discover reliable markers through a combination of genomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics it may be possible to develop a very useful and accurate blood test for breast cancer in the future. There is also the potential for gaining useful insights into disease state from other human samples, such as saliva or urine, which would be even less invasive and still more convenient, quick and less expensive. Such developments would be of great clinical significance and could potentially improve patient outcomes quite dramatically. The same can be said for other cancers if extensively studied.
Middle East Health: Is diagnostics the main area for clinical applications of multiomics approaches?
Dr. Halama: No, I would say it is an important area but by no means the only or even the main area for clinical applications. At the moment we are focusing very strongly on using metabolomics approaches to help us determine which cancer drugs work best for different types of breast cancer in various models. Metabolomics can therefore play a very important role in precision medicine as it can allow us to analyze in great detail whether a particular drug is likely to be effective for an individual cancer type, or whether a different drug or combination of drugs would be better. However, there is also huge potential for the development of better diagnostic tools to catch malignancy or the threat of malignancy earlier.
Middle East Health: What are the challenges with this type of research?
Dr. Halama: Having just said that the traditional clinical chemistry testing approach does not provide us with enough data, perhaps the key challenge with omics approaches is that they provide researchers with very large amounts of data which are time-consuming and complex to interpret. At WCM-Q we have the advantage of having an excellent bioinformatics core which can support very data-heavy analytics work. This allows us to analyze larger populations and more datapoints, which will give us a richer understanding of the complex associations and interactions between particular molecules, proteins, and genes that indicate the presence of particular diseases.
Middle East Health: What is the vision for the future in terms of the clinical experience for patients in the new era of multiomics?
Dr. Halama: In an ideal world, it would be great if we had accurate and reliable non-invasive markers for many complex diseases. This would mean that we would not need to take any tissue and everything can be conducted from a sample of blood, saliva or even tears or sweat. With the current technologies, I don’t see this happening now, but they are giving us a glimpse of a world in which this ideal situation might one day be possible. At the moment, the more realistic change is that we still need to take a tissue sample but that multiomics will allow us to provide more personalized medicine, rather than treating all patients with similar protocols. Doctors already use certain tests to group breast cancer patients based on the characteristics of their tumors, which helps decide the best treatment. However, these tests mainly look at specific
Middle East Health: What do you feel are the key areas for research in omics approaches, with regards to clinical applications?
Dr. Halama: My view is that gaining a greater understanding of the metabolic characteristics of patients and cancers will be a particularly fruitful area. The metabolism in my view is playing a huge role because cancer can be understood as a metabolic disease; the cancer cells change their metabolisms completely to survive in different conditions, and they adapt their metabolism in order to metastasize or to survive in harsh conditions where there is limitation of oxygen or glucose and so on. So they are adapting. Ideally, we are going to be able to use multiomics to understand those adaptations and target them. This has implications for drug selection, drug design, as well as diagnostic testing. With advanced multiomics testing we might be able to quite accurately detect a predisposition for developing a disease, or factors which suggest development of a disease is imminent. In cancer, where early detection is obviously extremely crucial to overall outcomes, being able to predict malignancy by detecting specific changes that are occurring in a patient’s metabolism before the actual malignancy even occurs would be an extremely powerful tool.
Middle East Health: Please tell us a little more about your current research activities.
Dr. Halama: At the moment my team focuses specifically on cancer and its dysregulated metabolism. We are aiming to identify potential therapeutic targets by leveraging omics technologies to characterize metabolic alterations in cancer, and, using in vitro models, we have been able to identify molecular pathways that contribute to drug resistance and the metastatic potential of cancer cells, which has been extremely encouraging. Currently, we are collaborating with clinicians from Hamad Medical Corporation to conduct an in-depth omics-based characterization of breast cancer patients – we believe that such precise molecular profiling could provide new insights into this complex disease, ultimately guiding more effective treatment strategies. So we feel very optimistic and energised about this particular area of research and its potential applications to improve healthcare outcomes.
Omics profiling for complex diseases
Clinical chemistry assays, which are standard strategies for assessing physiological and pathological processes in the body, are often insufficient to define complex diseases such as cancer. Technological advancements have led to the development of a range of high-throughput measurement techniques that allow for an in-depth characterization of our genome (genomics), transcriptome (transcriptomics), protein levels (proteomics), and metabolite levels (metabolomics). Collectively, these technologies are referred to as “omics” and they are considered a very promising area for research because they can provide a far more comprehensive overview of human health than was previously possible.
genetic mutations or gene activity, which limits how precisely treatments can be tailored. Multiomics holds the potential to increase the number of molecule types we can screen for and therefore enhance the level of precision of treatments.
- Visit our website, explore CPD events, and connect with us on social media for updates.
