Treating prostate cancer with fewer side effects
Isaac Asimov once said that the most exciting phrase to hear in science, “the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny....’ ” Dr. Somnath Mukhopadhyay experienced a “that’s funny” moment a few years ago as a member of a team testing new compounds in the course of a neuroscience project. Quite by accident, said Mukhopadhyay, an assistant professor of chemistry and a researcher at BBRI, “We observed that a compound we were using was killing cancer cells.” Before long, Mukhopadhyay the neuroscientist changed career direction, becoming Mukhopadhyay the cancer researcher. He has worked extensively with cannabinoid receptors — proteins within a cell that respond to, yes, the active ingredient in marijuana. These receptors are present in certain types of cells, including some cancer cells. “There’s an evolutionary reason for this but we don’t know what it is,” he said. Mukhopadhyay said his team found that when a specific cannabinoid receptor is exposed to certain molecules, it will bind with them and the cell will die. He believes this points the way toward development of a drug or drugs that “kill prostate cancer cells with less collateral damage — with fewer side effects.” And research data from other laboratories, he said, suggest potential for applications to other types of cancer as well.
John Scott, right, in his lab at BRITE with research scientist Syed Ahmad that bind to and disrupt the activity of various targets. Drawing from a vast library of compounds at NCCU’s Biomanufacturing Research Institute and Technology Enterprise (BRITE), he will be looking for chemicals that interrupt the process of tumor growth. “If we can knock out any one of the proteins along the pathway,” Scott said, “it will disrupt the signal and prevent tumor growth and metastasis.” He said his confidence is “pretty high” that BRITE’s collection of nearly a half-million compounds contains a molecule that will do the job. “We can screen the compounds to find ones that specifically inhibit this pathway,” Scott said. Then, he said, he and Johnson will test the compound in mice that have been injected with human triple negative breast cancer cells. If the compound inhibits cancer development in the mice, he said, “we’ll have proof of concept.” That, in turn, would launch the drug development process. “The pharmaceutical industry looks to academia for this kind of basic research,” he said.
From a practical health standpoint, he cautions, this research is at a very early stage — still at the cellular level. Subsequent tests would involve animals. “We’re a long way from the bedside.”
The barbershop fitness project
Laura Linnan, an associate professor of Health Behavior and Health Education at UNC-CH, is a pioneer in a very specific kind of community-based health program. For more than 10 years, she has been visiting beauty salons and barbershops, particularly those operated and patronized by African-Americans, developing low-cost ways to spread the word about prevention and treatment for diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer — all of which disproportionately affect black people. In her newest project, Linnan is teaming up with two NCCU researchers in the Department of Public Health Education — Dr. David Jolly, associate professor and department chair, and Dr. Seronda Robinson, an assistant professor. Robinson, who earned her Ph.D. in epidemiology at Chapel Hill, worked as a research assistant in 2000 on one of Linnan’s early beauty shop projects. The target this time is black men who do not get enough healthy exercise — and there are plenty of them. In North Carolina, according to Jolly and Linnan, 46 percent of black men are physically inactive. They under-use preventive care. And they die earlier; their life expectancy is about six years shorter than that of white men, and seven years shorter than that of black women. The new project goes by the name of FITShop (for “fitness in the
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Spring 2011