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Moriah Bellissimo, Ph.D., R.D., a former T32 fellow at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center and postdoctoral fellow at VCU Health Pauley Heart Center, has received a Career Transition Award from Susan G. Komen in support of her project “Physical Activity to Reduce Breast Cancer Treatment Morbidity.” Bellissimo will receive $649,000 in grant funding over five years.

Since its founding in 1982, Susan G. Komen has invested nearly $1.1 billion in breast cancer research, supporting more than 2,800 research studies and 550 clinical trials. One way Komen supports breast cancer research is through its Career Transition Award (CTA), which grants up to $650,000 to outstanding postdoctoral and clinical fellows who are working to launch their independent breast cancer research careers.

The CTA provides funding in two phases: Phase 1 supports the researcher’s final years of mentored training, while Phase 2 supports the early career investigator as they move into independent research in a tenure-track role.

Earlier this year, Bellissimo received a Pauley Pilot Grant to support her ongoing cardio-oncology and nutrition research, in which she uses lipidomics to investigate changes linked to the heart health of women with breast cancer. Her Komen CTA will allow her to expand on that work to investigate the beneficial effects of physical activity on the hearts of women who have undergone chemotherapy.

Today, women with breast cancer have a significant chance of surviving the disease if it is caught early enough. However, treatments used to cure breast cancer, such as chemotherapy, may start to negatively impact heart health within the first three months of treatment. Cardiac side effects of cancer treatment make it more difficult for some patients to do everyday tasks, such as going to work, household chores, or leisure activities such as walking or caring for children. Bellissimo is investigating these early-treatment and long-term changes in heart health.

Phase 1 of Bellissimo’s CTA will build upon work she has done in collaboration with her mentor Greg Hundley, M.D., director of Pauley and member of the Cancer Prevention and Control research program at Massey. Their research has shown that women who are physically active in the first three months of breast cancer treatment have no significant declines in their cardiac function or exercise capacity (a measurement of how much physical exertion a patient can sustain). In other words, women undergoing chemotherapy may be able to exercise to minimize the negative effects of cancer treatment on their heart health.

Bellissimo will investigate how exercise protects heart health during cancer treatment, and why it seems to do so effectively by analyzing both muscle quality — the amount of fat inside of muscles — and molecules in the blood called cytokines. In patients undergoing chemotherapy, muscle quality often gets worse, and more cytokines that can cause damage are present in the blood. Bellissimo wants to see how exercise improves these two measures.

Getting into a workout regimen is easier said than done for patients dealing with the physically and emotionally difficult process of chemotherapy treatment.

“When you’re immunocompromised, fatigued, nauseous and your day is completely full, it can be difficult to drive to the gym, shoulder prohibitive membership fees or even just find the time,” said Bellissimo, who previously completed a fellowship through Massey’s NCI-funded T32 Cancer Prevention and Control-Cancer Health Equity training program, which enables pre- and postdoctoral trainees to become future leaders in cancer prevention and control and cancer health equity science.

Part 2 of Bellissimo’s CTA will focus on “lifestyle physical activity,” a new exercise intervention where women undergoing chemotherapy treatment are taught to weave in small amounts of physical activity throughout their day.

“Physical activity guidelines often focus on exercise that is in bouts of ten minutes or more,” Bellissimo explained. “Some new evidence shows that we can start thinking about [exercise in] bouts of one, two or three minutes. In some novel research that we have seen, people who do these short bouts of work can still lower their risk of cardiovascular disease by 48 percent. We are going to test whether lifestyle physical activity is effective for women with breast cancer, if it protects their hearts, if it protects muscle quality and if it helps reduce inflammation.”

Bellissimo became interested in breast cancer research because she believes this work can impact lives.

“From my previous research to my Pauley Pilot to the Komen CTA, I want to empower patients,” she said. “I have spoken to patients who don’t feel as though they are active and involved in their health. They want to know what steps they can take on their own to help themselves. And I think this research is going to give them tools throughout their treatment to do just that.”

Bellissimo expressed gratitude to her primary co-mentors, including Hundley and Jessica LaRose, Ph.D., member of the Cancer Prevention and Control research program at Massey, who will guide her through Phase 1 of this project. She also thanked her other collaborators and mentors, including Bernard Fuemmeler, Ph.D., M.P.H., the associate director for population sciences at Massey; Fadi Salloum, Ph.D., member of the Cancer Prevention and Control research program at Massey; Justin Canada, Ph.D.; and Ralph D’Agostino, Ph.D.

This article was originally published on the VCU Health news center.