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Research conducted by Emmanuel’s Assistant Professor of Biology – Dr. Vincent Cannataro – was recently published in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal from the American Cancer Society, and is making headlines in publications like U.S News & World Report and Drugs.com. These headlines highlight Dr. Cannataro’s research linking certain mutational patterns in cancer to occupations where individuals are exposed to a heightened amount of hazardous chemicals, like firefighting.
The most recent piece, published on March 10th, is entitled “Glioma mutational signatures associated with haloalkane exposure are enriched in firefighters” and is a full-circle realization of multiple years of research and that Dr. Cannataro has led, spanning back to January 2022. Working closely with corresponding author Dr. Elizabeth B. Claus, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health and a neurosurgeon at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Dr. Cannataro was first author on the publication that included researchers from across the country.
Dr. Cannataro, who has been at Emmanuel College since 2019, is a computational biologist – which means he uses mathematical tools and computer programs to analyze biological data and learn more about biological processes. Part of his research over the past few years has focused on the genome of gliomas, tumors that form in the brain, and the mutations that lead to the formation of those tumors.
“It’s connecting the dots to see what fuels the cancers…and then applying that knowledge to inform how we can prevent future cancers from happening,” Dr. Cannataro said.
The most recent publication and study connected the gliomas to specific chemicals called haloalkanes – often found in firefighting equipment – and made the connection between those cancer-driving mutations and people who had a history as firefighters or worked in other occupations where they have been exposed to harmful chemicals, such as painting or being a mechanic.
The glioma research all started with a paper published in Neuro-Oncology in 2022, which analyzed specific mutations that lead to cancer in males and females. They found that drivers that fuel the cancer sometimes differ in males and females – and the research suggested there may be some external risk factors that lead to glioma that were especially prevalent in males.
It was within that same paper that he identified the haloalkanes as a rare environmental risk factor for certain glioma cases, which would eventually tie back to the main focus of the March 2025 study focusing on firefighters.
In a 2022 paper published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, a peer-reviewed journal from the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, Dr. Cannataro further outlined the strategy to calculate which mutational processes are associated with cancer formation and to what degree certain mutations contribute to the formation of certain cancers – a crucial element to informing public health strategies surrounding these risk factors.
From then on, Dr. Cannataro worked on outlining this framework further, detailing how others can use software to do similar analyses themselves. Two Emmanuel College alumni – Kira Glasmacher ’24 and Caralynn Hampson ‘24 even got a chance to co-author a paper in 2024 when they were undergraduates studying in the Cannataro lab.
More from Dr. Cannataro:
On your list of accomplishments, share one or two that feel especially significant to you and why – what made those such important milestones?
- “The first one that comes to mind is our 2022 manuscript. It’s significant to me because it represents years of work, where we built up these concepts in separate places over the years and ‘put the pieces together’ in a lot of ways – and made the tools to do so freely available in the scientific community. On top of that, the work was featured in Scientific American, which was especially significant to me because my father gifted me a subscription to the magazine when I declared as a science major in college. To have my work featured there later on was deeply meaningful to me.”
From your perspective, what is so unique to the student experience at Emmanuel, and how do you try to contribute to that through your instruction?
- “All of my students are student-scientists: From my 1000-level class where students are actively engaged in real science that is contributing to potential tuberculosis treatments through my 4000-level classes where students engage in research on cancer evolution that they’re preparing for publication. From their first semester through graduation, students are immersed in research laboratories!”
What is a long-term goal of yours or a lasting impact you hope to make on the Emmanuel community?
- “I have benefitted immensely from an all-star cast of mentors throughout the years. I hope to pay that forward and help students realize their own dreams – both through mentorship in the classroom and in the laboratory.”
Research Timeline:
- 2022: "Environmental and sex-specific modular signatures of glioma causation"
- 2022: "Attribution of Cancer Origins to Endogenous, Exogenous, and Preventable Mutational Processes"
- 2023: "Estimation of Neutral Mutation Rates and Quantification of Somatic Variant Selection Using cancereffectssizeR"
- 2024: "Mutations, substitutions, and selection: Linking mutagenic processes to cancer using evolutionary theory"
- 2025: "Glioma mutational signatures associated with haloalkane exposure are enriched in firefighters"