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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The partnership with Italian experts provides young talent and what amounts to a human database.

About 500 samples of serum, the protein-rich liquid that separates from clotted blood, have been flown to George Mason from cancer centers in Italy, along with 250 tissue samples and a cadre of Italian researchers, some of whom have been a bit mystified by their new campus and suburban life.

"It was like, George what? I never heard about that," said Alessandra Luchini, who came from north of Venice and was awed by U.S. geography. "You can survive in Italy without a car, without Internet," said Luchini, who lives in Burke.

But she was at ease with the bubbling cylinders she used to develop a new class of nanoparticles that are among the lab's most promising inventions. They act like tiny lobster traps. "You can put inside this particle the bait you want. We are developing new baits every day," Luchini said.

When the particles are dumped into serum, they search out and collect tiny bits of floating cancer, giving researchers a way to test patients before tumors can be found.

"That's many billions of them," Liotta said, pointing to a tube of blue liquid in the lab. Each particle, made of a meshwork of polymer strands, is one-fiftieth the size of a red blood cell. "It's fun, isn't it?"

They've also made progress on other baits, such as one they are developing to test athletes for doping.

Mariaelena Pierobon, 29, used the Virginia lab's advanced tools to analyze pieces of tumor from the 51 Italian patients' colons and livers. It would have been tougher for the researchers to acquire a similar set of matched samples in the United States, because of stricter rules at some of the review boards that govern such work, Petricoin said.

As a surgical resident in Padua, Pierobon saw the disease winning too often. "It's difficult to get through it. You exactly know, when you see a patient, what's going to happen to them," Pierobon said. So she moved to research, and to Manassas. "I thought it was one way to do something for them."

The key question was whether the highlighted routes driving the patients' cancer were different in the colon and in the liver. That's important because liver metastases are what can kill patients, but chemotherapy choices often have been based on the properties of the primary tumor in the colon.

The Italian samples were conclusive. "It was like, 'Yeah, there's a difference,' " Petricoin said. "It's growing in completely different soil," Liotta said.

Now they are using the new routes to find treatments. Which is where Kirsten Edmiston, the medical director of the cancer program at Inova Fairfax, and a colleague, Alex Spira, come in. "We are the next iteration," Edmiston said.

In the clinical trial they are developing, which if approved could begin later this year, patients would come to Inova to get special liver biopsies. Pieces of their tumors would be tested at George Mason to see what works on them.

"That's the whole point. [We] are becoming much more sophisticated in our ability to diagnose and really characterize the tumor and tailor the therapies based on the profile," Edmiston said.

Then, she said, "you follow the clinical patient to see if the tumor gets smaller."