Hormel Institute researchers are getting recognition — for their pictures.

A microscopic image related to breast cancer from researchers at the Institute has been featured on a leading scientific journal’s cover.

The image featured on the March 2015 cover of Cancer Prevention Research, a journal published by the American Association for Cancer Research, came from the Cancer Biomarkers and Drug Resistance research section led by Dr. Ann M. Bode, associate director of The Hormel Institute. Staining for the image was performed by senior laboratory technician Alyssa Langfald.

Bode collaborated on a project studying the cancer-preventive qualities of a diabetes drug called metformin with researchers from the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland; University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama; Mayo Clinic Cancer Center in Rochester; and Huntsman Cancer Institute, Salt Lake City, Utah.

“Our work focuses on looking for and visualizing tissue biomarkers to determine whether a drug is effective in treating or preventing cancer, and Ms. Langfald is obviously quite skilled in this technology,” Bode said in a press release. “Even though the drug was ineffective in changing tumor growth in a variety of experimental laboratory models, it still might be useful or effective in specific subgroups of individuals at high risk for certain types of cancers. Only a clinic trial targeting those subgroups will be able to determine its efficacy.”

In the published study, the team of researchers — in anticipation of using metformin in clinical trials in nondiabetic women — studied metformin’s effectiveness in preventing breast cancer in nondiabetic animals commonly used in mammary cancer projects. Researchers found a lack of efficacy from using metformin, calling the results “somewhat disconcerting,” but noted metformin’s cancer-preventive qualities possibly could be observed in models with altered physiology associated with diabetes or prediabetes.