Not all tumors and the cancer that causes them are the same. Dr. Marc Birtwistle, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and his team are using DNA “barcodes” to look inside tumors to view them in more detail. Birtwistle’s lab focuses on cancer systems biology, which is applying engineering principles to better understand cancer and how to treat it.
Dr. Birtwistle explains there are a lot of different types of DNA barcodes. The lab is using the DNA as a vehicle to attach the real barcodes, which are colors, made by different combinations of fluorophores attached to an antibody. An antibody is a reagent that allows someone to look very specifically at something in some sort of biological sample or a tissue slice, for instance, from a biopsy. “Our ability to measure things that antibodies can recognize like proteins or how proteins are modified, those are really important in controlling normal physiology (the branch of biology that deals with the normal functions of living organisms and their parts), but also disease and disease progression.” Ten to fifteen years ago scientists were limited to viewing maybe four color images, and then there were some advances that made it possible to look at about forty images. The human genome has approximately 30,000 genes so being able to view only forty colors is very limiting when trying to gather data to determine why, for example, this biopsy slice is doing what it is doing, and how to best go about treating it. Having more of the DNA barcodes (the barcodes are unique on the color spectrum, and the number of colors represent the barcode) allow more data to be retrieved to move toward a better understanding disease progression or potentially effective drugs for a cancer patient.
In layman’s terms, “The Birtwistle Lab combines computation and experimental methods to understand how cancer cells make decisions. We aim to use this understanding to better predict drug and drug combination responses.”
In this instance “the more information the better” is true. The data that can be gathered from this new technology can “probably do a lot better job of figuring out and proposing what drugs we think are going to work better for this person versus the other person,” Dr. Birtwistle expounds. This research may not lead to a cure but could take the medical community down a path where cancer can be mitigated to a controlled illness than can be dealt with similar to the pharmaceutical advances that have made HIV virally suppressed and undetectable.
