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At IIT, dozens of students and faculty are pursuing cutting-edge research in cancer prevention and care. While
they may be conducting their work quietly, they are being noticed. From a new $22 million grant to assess the
relationship between cell phones and cancer to funding that supports innovations in x-ray imaging, IIT?s cancer
researchers are leading a powerful search for a cure.
Jialing Xiang is standing at a table surrounded by bottles of chemicals and dozens of vials. In one corner of the
Life Sciences lab a graduate student splits cancer cells and will store some of them in a huge vat of liquid
nitrogen. Nearby, a Ph.D. student pours thick blue gel into a container in order to separate proteins.
They are looking for a suicide program gone awry.
In an engineering lab, Professors Miles Wernick, Yongyi Yang, and Jovan Brankov huddle around a computer
monitor, viewing mammograms made with their new x-ray imaging technique. By producing highly detailed images
of soft tissue, the method may take the guesswork out of breast cancer diagnosis, while also reducing the
radiation dose to the patient. If approved by the FDA, it will represent the first fundamental change in the way
medical x-ray images are made since their introduction in the late nineteenth century.
But there are engineering problems still to be solved.
Although it might not be as well known as other on-going studies, cancer research is thriving at labs
across campus. Teams from life sciences, engineering, and IIT Research Institute (IITRI) are facing the
future head on, studying the drugs, treatments, and technology that may take us closer to finding a cure.
And because they have no university hospital affiliation, they are conducting nearly every aspect of
research directly on site.
?Cancer research at IIT is a little-known gem,? says F. R. McMorris, dean of the College of Science and
Letters. ?I don?t think most people realize that we have researchers delving into a number of significant
issues, from understanding what prevents cancer cells from dying off naturally, to how to kill cancer
cells without affecting healthy cells.?
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In life sciences, understanding the former is a work in progress for Jialing Xiang, assistant professor of
biology. The adult body, she explains, has roughly 10,000 billion cells, and good health depends upon
maintaining the right number. ?There are two ways to do this,? she says. ?One is to control the growth
rate. The second is to control what we call a ?suicide program,? or cell death program, in which the cells
die by themselves.?
The cell death program is called apoptosis, which is Greek for ?falling of leaves from a tree.? As cells
die by apoptosis, they literally fall off their supporting structure. The process eliminates extraneous
cells, or cells that are already damaged.
The concept of apoptosis is just 30 years old, and Xiang is traveling down a little-chartered path. The
conventional thinking is that cancer is caused by out-of-control growth; the newer concept is that it can
also be caused by a dysfunction of the cell death, or suicide, program.
Xiang and her team are studying the program at the molecular level, trying to find out where and how
apoptosis goes wrong. Why can?t certain bodies get rid of their bad cells? Why can?t they activate their
suicide program? She is trying to find a clue that?s applicable for a variety of cancers?breast, prostate,
leukemia, and neuroblastoma among them.
?The goal is to discover the problem and provide the information to drug designers for cancer prevention,?
says Xiang. ?Unless they know the source of the problem, they can?t find the solution.?
Joy Chong, assistant professor of chemistry, is working on precision. She is developing cancer drugs that
can be employed for a new cancer therapeutic technology called radioimmunotherapy (RIT). The goal is to
provide a lethal dose of radiation only to tumor cells without causing radiation toxicity to healthy cells.
At the end of her research?which, she cautions, is many years in the future?lies the exciting possibility
of cancer that can no longer metastasize, or spread from one part of the body to another.
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?The effectiveness of the technology is based on two factors,? she says. One is the use of a ?smart tracing
agent,? the result of an antibody binding with a toxin or antigen enzyme that is expressed on tumor cells.
Using a synthetic linker, radiation is attached to the smart tracing agent, which attracts tumors. Then RIT
employs tumor-targeting antibodies for highly selective delivery of the radiation, reaching the cancerous
cells and minimizing the exposure of healthy, normal cells.
?This antibody-targeted radiotherapeutic approach is very promising,? says Chong, ?in that a variety of
tumor types can be selectively treated based on antigen-antibody affinity.? In addition to being effective
on several types
of tumors, the RIT drug has been shown to significantly enhance the overall response rate of treatment.
Still another benefit: It is better tolerated in cancer patients than chemotherapy.
It is clear that the RIT technology cannot be effective without the appropriate drug. Chong is working to
bring it to life and to eliminate the ability of the deadly disease to spread.
At IITRI, researchers are working on preventing cancer altogether. Cancer research has been conducted at
the institute since the 1960s, when IITRI was awarded a series of programs from the National Cancer
Institute (NCI) to evaluate the activity of novel cancer drugs in experimental model systems. Within the
following 30 years, IITRI researchers tested thousands of new drugs and natural product extracts, a number
of which are now in common use in clinical oncology.
In the 1970s a separate initiative brought an NCI grant for researchers to study chemopreventive agents.
?At the time chemoprevention was controversial; lots of people thought it couldn?t work,? says David
McCormick, professor of Biology and senior vice-president and director of IITRI. ?But we demonstrated very
clearly in experimental model systems that it did work. IITRI was one of the first labs to generate
significant data to show this was a viable approach for cancer control.?
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