On Sunday June 6th, the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University will celebrate National Cancer Survivors Day with the largest event of its kind in the country, featuring a four-mile noncompetitive walk for cancer survivors, their friends, and families.
In honor of this event, we spoke with two key players in the fight against cancer – a researcher using revolutionary technology to detect the disease in its earliest stages, and a cancer survivor with important advice for physicians and fellow patients.
Vadim Backman, professor of biomedical engineering at the McCormick School and member of the Lurie Cancer Center, is using nanotechnology, which allows researchers to work at the level of individual molecules and atoms, to develop early screening methods for colon, pancreatic and lung cancer. We asked Backman how this technology works, and what promise it holds for the future.
Your lab is developing techniques to detect certain cancers much sooner. Can you tell me about this?
Right now, cancer detection is done at the microscopic level—changes in cells that can be viewed with a microscope—and we’re missing important changes at the nanoscale. Before cells become abnormal at the micro-level, they become abnormal at the nano-level. In cancer, changes happen extremely early on, and we don’t want to wait until a tumor forms to detect them.
How can you detect changes at the nano-level?
We use optical imaging techniques that were developed in our laboratory. By observing how light reflects off of different nanoscale structures inside the cell, we can detect nano-level changes that indicate the early stages of cancer.
What’s especially exciting is that these changes can be detected not only in cells from inside a tumor, but from the surrounding areas as well. This means that we could conduct early cancer screenings using cells from more easily accessible areas of the organ.
Take colon cancer, for example. Existing guidelines say that people over 50 should get a colonoscopy once every several years (frequency depends on individual risk factors), but only 25% of people do. And realistically, we couldn’t do this [perform colonoscopies] for everyone because of cost, waiting times, and many people just don’t like getting them.
The solution is to pre-screen. We could brush cells from inside the rectum – not requiring any prep – and analyze them to find alterations at the nanoscale. If the results are positive, the person would then have a colonoscopy. It would be easier to do, cheaper, and less invasive for the patient.
Colon cancer is just one example. This extends to other organs, like the pancreas. Right now, there is no early detection for pancreatic cancer. But, we can brush cells close to the pancreas using upper endoscopy and analyze them for nano-level changes. For lung cancer, we can brush cells from the inside of the cheek. Imagine—going to the dentist and being screened for lung cancer.
At what stage is the technology now?
Along with our clinical collaborators from Northshore University HealthSystem led by Dr. Hemant Roy, we’re in the early stages of clinical trials for all three (colon, lung, and pancreatic cancer), and we’ve studied several hundred patients. But we still need to study several thousand patients. So far, we’ve learned that the technology needs to be refined, and we’re working to find ways to make analyzing the cells faster.
What’s your vision for this technology long-term?
Basically, it could be like the pap smear for cervical cancer, the only really successful screening program for cancer. Cervical cancer used to be the number one cancer in women, and the introduction of the pap smear changed this dramatically. My dream is that a patient could come in for his or her annual physical and, at the same time, have cells brushed from a few areas to be screened for several major cancers. We could find these cancers sooner, and reduce mortality.
Katarina, a cancer survivor and mother of young children, was diagnosed with colon cancer while just in her mid-thirties. Four years later, she