At a recent Stand Up for Science rally at the federal plaza in Chicago, one of the speakers mentioned that the most important six words are “let me tell you a story” when it comes to trying to explain why science funding is important. The idea is to explain to everyday people how the work we (scientists) do makes life better for everyone.
I’ve been thinking about how to explain how vital the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to biomedical research and advances in medicine. I was already thinking about explaining how the peer-review process works and give a few examples of research that I have worked on. I’m still working on that but I think it’s important to keep the momentum going from the rally.
So let me tell you a story. A lot of traditional (older) chemotherapies have a lot of side effects. Essentially the doctors are trying to find the dose that kills more tumor cells and spares good, normal tissue. One size does not fit all. The dose of a chemotherapeutic drug needs to be titrated. That means you start at the recommended dose for someone’s size, sex, tumor type, etc. Then you adjust the dose on the subsequent visits.
Rather than rely on the patient reporting how they feel after each dose, what if you could see “off target” side effects? What if you could take an image of the patient and see which organs are getting damaged from the chemotherapy and also see how much the tumor is responding to chemotherapy. With that information you could personalize medicine for that particular patient. That’s one of the projects that I’m working on. Let me continue the story.
Every cell has a membrane where the machinery of the cell is behind a membrane, like the skin of a balloon. The surface of the cell membrane might have receptors, that you probably have heard of. Double negative breast cancer refers to two types of receptors that breast tumors typically have.
When a cell is damaged or dying, it often exposes the inner portion of the cell membrane. One of my colleagues has developed an imaging probe that identifies damaged and dying cells by latching onto the exposed inner cell membrane with a radioisotope. We use an imaging technique called Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) to make an image of the whole body, where we can visualize the damaged tissue. I wrote about SPECT a long time ago when I was doing #SciCom on #GooglePlus, which I converted to a blog.
You can read our paper here:
Johnson SE, Ugolkov A, Haney CR, Bondarenko G, Li L, Waters EA, Bergan R, Tran A, O’Halloran TV, Mazar A, Zhao M. Whole-body Imaging of Cell Death Provides a Systemic, Minimally Invasive, Dynamic, and Near-real Time Indicator for Chemotherapeutic Drug Toxicity. Clin Cancer Res. 2019 Feb 15;25(4):1331-1342. doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-18-1846. Epub 2018 Nov 12.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30420445
In another application, this technology can be used to see how damaged heart tissue is after a heart attack. This is useful in deciding if a patient is a good candidate for bypass surgery. If there is too much damaged tissue, bypass surgery would be a useless risk. On the other hand, if there is damaged heart tissue but not a lot of dead tissue, that patient would be a better candidate for bypass surgery.
None of this happens without funding from the NIH. You might have also heard that NIH funding was frozen or that indirect costs for research covered by the NIH is being reduced. Indirect costs pay for things like veterinary staff, facilities maintenance, electricity, etc. Charging this overhead, item by item, would be inefficient.
I will be working on a more in depth writeup on Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR)/Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) funding from the NIH, that’s related to this project. However, I wanted to say that the Stand Up for Science rally helped focus my energy.
