In a Va. Lab, Forging Links To Speed Cancer Advances

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A Creative Collaboration for Cancer Research

Researchers at George Mason University in Va. are working with Italian cancer specialists to study tumor samples in an effort to understand how cancer spreads and how to try to stop it.

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"It's like a GPS thing on your car, a highlighted route. It drives a patient's cancer," Liotta said.

Researchers around the globe are searching for spots along those routes that, if blocked with the right drugs, would thwart the growth of cancer cells. The emerging field is called proteomics.

On a recent afternoon in their lab at GMU's Prince William campus outside Manassas, Petricoin reached for a rainbow-colored biochemical chip that is central to their work. Researchers blow apart cancer cells using detergents, then apply what's left.

Then they feed the chip, dotted with cancer from many patients, into a machine they developed to look for a map of how the proteins wreak their destruction. They founded Theranostics Health to commercialize the technique.

Their insight in finding highlighted routes captured Belluco's imagination in 2001.

A decade earlier, Belluco had established a tissue bank at the University of Padua, where Galileo once performed secret autopsies.

"I was storing frozen tissue from every patient who underwent surgery for cancer," said Belluco, known in Padua as a "volcano," a source of intense and contagious enthusiasm. Petricoin, meanwhile, joked that he and Liotta were sometimes seen as "a double-headed monster" because of their determined personalities.

It was a good match. Soon the Italians were creating a national serum bank to be used for research on both sides of the Atlantic.

Liotta and Petricoin eventually bristled under the limits of working for the federal government. In 2004, they were called to testify before Congress over a consulting arrangement that had been approved by NIH supervisors.

They left for GMU the following year. They said they wanted the freedom to cut through the practical problems that prevent discoveries from reaching patients, such as by finding new ways to collect cancer samples and building relationships with the doctors and firms that can spread advances.

Once a breakthrough is published, "99 percent of the work is still to be done on that discovery for a patient to benefit," Liotta said.

They have partnered, for example, on a trial in which George Mason researchers are on hand for the biopsies of patients with multiple myeloma, a kind of bone marrow cancer. Greg Orloff and his colleagues at Inova Fairfax take a sample of living cancer cells and, within minutes, the GMU researchers treat the cells in a dish with dozens of possible drugs. Researchers analyze the cells to see whether any of the drugs worked, information doctors can use for treatment.