The future — it’s no longer about whether a therapy worked in aggregate. It’s now about whether a therapy is working for a specific patient.
Meet Julie Deutsch, MD, a physician-scientist and pathologist at Johns Hopkins University whose research is focused on developing the next generation of tissue-based biomarkers to help guide cancer treatment.
As a pathologist, Dr. Deutsch spends much of her time looking at tissue samples under the microscope. But where others might see a standard pathology slide, she sees an enormous source of information — one that could help clinicians better understand an individual patient’s cancer and determine which treatments are most likely to work.
“I’ve seen the power of having the pathology specimen and what information we can glean from it make a real difference for patients,” said Dr. Deutsch. “Not only in prognosticating them, but also in giving clinicians an opportunity to make decisions based on the pathology that these patients have.”
With her recently awarded Cancer Research Institute (CRI) STAR award, Dr. Deutsch plans to combine pathology with advanced computational approaches, including machine learning, to uncover information hidden within tissue samples that are already routinely collected from patients.
Her goal is precision oncology at its most practical: developing biomarkers that can reveal how an individual patient is responding to therapy, identify signs of response or resistance, and ultimately help clinicians match the right patient with the right treatment.
“You don’t want to expose patients to a therapy that they’re not going to benefit from, and they’re just going to have toxicity,” said Dr. Deutsch. “Really trying to match the right patient with the right therapy is so critically important.”
But discovering a promising biomarker is only part of the challenge.
A defining focus of Dr. Deutsch’s research is implementation — taking discoveries made in the laboratory and finding ways to make them useful for patients in real time. That means developing approaches that can work not only at major academic medical centers with specialized technology and expertise, but eventually at scale, where they could benefit patients more broadly.
“You can have the best biomarker in the world, but if it doesn’t get to patients and doesn’t help them in real time, then it’s useless,” she said.
That focus makes the flexibility of the STAR program particularly valuable. Designed to invest in exceptional scientists rather than narrowly defined projects, the program gives researchers the freedom to pursue ambitious ideas, adapt as the science evolves, and explore directions that traditional funding mechanisms may not support.
For Dr. Deutsch, that freedom has already been central to the evolution of her research. Machine learning, now an important component of her work, was not originally part of the path she envisioned as a pathologist. Collaborating across disciplines and following the science opened an entirely new way to approach the questions she wanted to answer.
“The ability to be in the right space and have access to samples and come up with new ideas, and that ability to sort of adapt in real time to the changing needs of science and of medicine is really amazing,” she said. “I’m excited to see where the journey takes me.”
The STAR award also arrives at a consequential moment for early-career researchers pursuing work that can be difficult to fund through traditional channels — particularly the implementation research needed to move discoveries from the laboratory into patient care.
“As an early-stage researcher, my career goals and ability to conduct research would not be possible without foundations like this,” said Dr. Deutsch. “It’s foundations like CRI that make that possible.”
Ultimately, every piece of Dr. Deutsch’s research comes back to the patient. By finding new information in tissue samples that already exist — and developing practical ways to put that information to use — she hopes to help transform how clinicians make treatment decisions for individual patients.
“Without that information, you’re sort of just flying blind,” she said. “And that’s not good enough for patients.”
From finding new answers hidden in familiar pathology slides to ensuring those answers reach the patients who need them, Dr. Deutsch embodies the bold, patient-centered thinking the STAR program was created to support. CRI is proud to invest in her vision — and in a future where increasingly precise biomarkers help make cancer treatment more personal, informed, and effective.
