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There is this day in May two thousand and seven when Doctor Troyer came into my
office and said, Hi, I'm Deryl Troyer, and I would like to work with you.
that actually when we started and then
we uh... had a collaborative
project with nanoscale, just
looking at the properties of ionic nanoparticles in cancer
treatment and uh... he and I very quickly learned
that we really gel, and we have daily contact, we bounce our ideas
off each other
and you have to realize if you come as far as we did
that uh... science of a thousand small steps
you don't sit there and have a glass of wine.
and say
in two thousand and twelve, we will reach this uh... this is uh... daily
work
and you'll
going like
like this it's not a very straight because
it's undiscovered country as Doctor Tryoyer says, you do not know
where to go, unless you go there.
On any given day at any given time we can, be the first
eyes in the world to see something new
you know that uh... that
you know every
every day has that promise and of course it doesn't happen every day but um...
it's when you see that first glimpse of something that
uh... it makes everything else
really worthwhile
we were working with uh...
uh... developing pro drugs in other words drugs that can be cleaved by
certain enzymes in the tumor to
to be active and
so we wondered well if we can
use this uh...
use this approach maybe we can also use this uh... basic idea for
uh... for detecting enzyme activity in the serum, so Doctor Bossmann went to work
in
and really uh... went to the drawing board and and started to
uh... developed these uh...
magnetic nanoparticle coupled
dyes
We need three components working together
the first one is ion nanoparticle
where we had to design
uh... a nanoparticle about twenty nanometers
which has the ability to
quench the light
of an organic sensitizer, that's a dye
and this dye shines if you put some light on it, shows flouresence,
but only
if it's free of the nanoparticle. So if both together,
then the dye doesn't shine and there's
a linker
and this linker can be chopped by an enzyme and that's how they detect our
cancer enzymes.
So in the absence of an enzyme
nanoparticle and dye are together
In the presence of an enzyme they
become loose and the dye shows flouresence.
so the number of photons we get ou or just how much light
we get out
is indicative
of how active
this enzyme is in blood serum,
and then we do this tests for fifteen enzymes in parallel,
and get something which we call a body's signature just showing how
much of each enzyme is there.
The working hypothesis is that it works on
uh... every solid tumor, a solid tumor is a tumor somewhere in your body not like
uh... leukemia for instance
and so a solid tumor has problems
it has to connect to the blood supply,
it has to grow against the tissue
and then of course it has to colonize the whole body
and so these enzymes uh... helpings the tumor
doing just that
so the
idea is
that every solid tumor has principally the same problems and therefore it
is very likely
that we find uh... body's signatures which are very similar. We are looking at
uh... the basic needs of the tumor, let's put it this way
and so chances are
that uh... this body signatures could be very similar because a tumor
without it would not be able to survive.
We are actually testing us on the on human
serum samples now
and
and we're collaborating with Universe of Kansas cancer center
to test some other kinds of cancer
uh... and we... we want like I said we also would like to start using this
uh... on canine patients or feline patients
and another another aspect that really isn't
doesn't involve the serum
uh... in doing blood tests,
uh... involves uh trying to
ascertain
where a tumor boundary is located. That would be, that would be very valuable.
Surgeons have always the problem
that uh... they have to excise uh... the right tumor, you don't want to
excise too much
and you don't want to excise too little
this technology helps to see the exact boundary
between cancers and healthy tissue.
We do uh... work with
uh... an expert in statistics that's Doctor Gary Gadbury,
who is analyzing the data that we have and we needs this independent uh...
statistical analysis to be sure that our the results are really meaningful.
One would like to avoid
uh... just uh... falling into the uh... trap of being too excited about your own
measurement so you need an independent
expert who looks at your numbers and looks at your values
and actually he found that we have a ninety five percent
probability to really see early breast cancer and early
lung cancer in human patients. This project is one
part of the bigger endeavor that we have
So cancer
detection
in blood samples is very vital because early detection can save alot
of lives.
We estimate that we can
save approximately fifty percent of
lives,
with the the technology that is available
right now by recognizing cancer earlier. We work on uh... cell-based technologies
learning how to
feed anticancer drugs to defensive cells, and these cells go
to tumors, and these charge
the chemotherapeutic drugs uh... right onsite which will lead to
drastic decrease in the amount of chemotherapy that they need,
by one percent or less
of a drug, which means we do not wipe out the whole immune system
and so uh... so patients are much much better chance to cope with this,
by hitting a cancer much more specifically
but Doctor Troyer is the expert on that. But the technologies that we developed
have always
more than one we to go. Basically the same nanoparticles can be used to
detect human... and they can be used for hypothermia treatment of cancer
heating this cancers
to a point
where it activates the immune system
and so it's a fascinating work
uh... because from each point you have several ways to go and of course funding
plays a role in which way we go
and what's most promising is definitely a big big uh..
decider of where to go next.
And we have a group which is strong in the biology side and strong in
chemistry side and we have several individuals which really have been in
both of these camps
and that makes it easy to find a common language
I have post docs
in my lab who are also
involved
and actually a couple of very good post docs that came from Doctor Bossmann's lab
so they have a very
excellent background
in chemistry
and discussion is very important and having a group culture understanding
each other
is very important
and you need a year or so because
uh... we come from very different backgrounds, not only regionally
uh... he needed of course a year before he understood my German accent
but otherwise
uh...
but uh... it's important that if we use a word
we mean exactly the same with that word,
english is of course a language which makes it hard from time to time
because there are so many meanings to every word.
We have one big group and
we have two centers, and what's really
special
about this is uh... that a
I'm not the chemist who doing my stuff and then he tested at the end and finds
nothing
we uh.. going back and for and back and forth, do early testing
we do animal testing we get uh... human samples in whenever
possible
so you try to make this vital decisions early.
So you avoid
synthesizing a lot of stuff which doesn't work
and you avoid getting hung up on your own ideas
uh... because we keep the components that work
and we have to abandon the components which do not work. Life is too short to have
your pet molecule
and synthesize two hundred and eleven versions of it,
what's important is
to see that if you want to beat cancer we have to be functional and
you cannot do this without the expert imput from
the uh... biology, from the medicinal side.
And the hurdles at Kansas State are usually very low and I appreciate
that I can collaborate with colleagues,
but of course and Doctor Troyer's and my case, that's a special case because
it works so well
and so much fun to do.