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Aand you have to realize if you come as far as we did that's a science of
uh... thousand small steps,
you don't sit there with a glass of wine
and say
in two thousand and twelve, we will reach this uh... this is uh... daily
work
and your
going like
like this it's not a very straight because it's undiscovered country.
On any given day at any given time we can be the first
first eyes in the world to see something new you know
that
you know every
everyday has a promise and of course that doesn't happen every day but um...
it's
when you see that first glimpse of something that
uh... it's... it's makes everything else
really worthwhile. We were working with
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...
use this approach, maybe we can also use this basic idea for
uh... for detecting enzyme activity in serum.
We had to design a nanoparticle of about twenty nanometers
which has an 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 floresence but only
if it's free of the nanoparticle. So it goes 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 we detect our
cancer enzymes, so the absence of an enzyme
nanoparticle and dye are together
in the presence of an enzyme
they become loose and then the dye shows fluorescence so the number of photons we get out
or just how much light we get out is indicative
of how active
this enzyme is in blood serum
and then we do these 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. But the working hypothesis is that it works on
uh... every
solid tuma a solid tumor
as a tumor somewhere in your body not like your lukemia, for instance
and so a solid tumor has problems
it has to connect 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 this enzymes helping the tumor doing just that.
We're actually testing this on human serum samples now
and
and were collaborating with Universe of Kansas cancer center
to test some other kinds of cancer . And we do work with
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 results are really meaningful and
actually, he found that they 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 and blood samples is very vital because early detection will save
alot of lives,
we estimate that they can
save approximately fifty percent of lives with the existing technology that is
available right now by recognizing cancer earliler. The same technology can be
applied to find tumors in your body and to mark tumor boundaries.
Surgeons have always the problem
that they have to excise 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
boundries between cancer and healthy tissue
I have post docs in
my lab who are also
involved
uh... and actually a couple of very good post docs came from
Dr. Bossmann's lab, so they have a very
excellent background in chemistry.
It's important is to see that if you 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 I can collaborate with colleagues
but of course Dr. Troyer and my case that's a special case because
it works so well.
and so much fun to do.