MU dedicates new facility for cancer research

MU donated more than $9 million to the new facility.

By Matt Reinig

Published Oct. 24, 2008

A cancer treatment better than chemotherapy might be just around the corner because of MU's new International Institute of Nano and Molecular Medicine.

MU celebrated its contribution to the future of medical science in a symposium on Monday commemorating the institute. MU provided $9.4 million for the total project cost.

"The project was just under $10 million," Campus Facilities Project Manager Jude Wawrzyniak said. "It was all MU funds."

The project began in March 2006, a contract was awarded Oct. 15, 2006, and the project was substantially completed in January 2008.

The research facility is now beginning to accelerate its operations.

"We're creating a whole new, almost pseudo-department," said Mark Lee, assistant director of the institute. "The institute kind of stands by itself, so recruiting the people, getting the facilities going, getting all the instrumentation here and operational - it's a major challenge."

The institute's main focus is on Boron Neutron Capture Therapy, a form of radiotherapy cancer treatment. Lee said the therapy would be used predominantly to treat solid tumors.

"There are many, many types of solid cancers out there," Lee said. "Lung cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer. We're interested in treating common tumors that affect millions of people a year."

Lee also said through the new therapy, the vast majority of radiation is created and contained within the selected cancer cells, and healthy cells and tissue will have minimal negative effects.

"The real key to BNCT is that the distance that these particles can travel, creating ionization tracts along the way, is equal to about one cell diameter," Lee said. "What this means is that we can actually create radiation within a cell and contain it entirely within the volume of a single cell, so the healthy cells or healthy tissue around the area are not exposed to radiation at all."

Contemporary methods like External Radiation Therapy and chemotherapy damage healthy cells, tissues and ultimately the patient, he said.

"This is vastly superior to a traditional radiotherapy," Lee said. "For instance external X-ray therapy, where you're radiating a deep-seated tumor with X-rays, typically you have to go in from multiple directions over many sessions of administrations, daily radiations for six weeks. You're killing and affecting healthy tissue all the way through the body."

These daily radiations over six-week periods are the result of traditional cancer treatments being highly dependent on the life cycle of cells for the effectiveness of their treatment, he said. This is not the case with BNCT.

"This will kill cells regardless of the cell cycle they're in," Lee said. "And furthermore, this process can be administered in a single dose. So we're not talking about six to eight weeks of daily radiation. This is one 20-minute treatment."

Lee hopes BNCT treatments could begin on large animals such as dogs within the next 18 months to two years.

"We'll be treating them as patients," Lee said of the prospective veterinary treatment. "These are spontaneously occurring tumors right now where current treatment can offer little hope. Most of these animals are euthanized."

BNCT radiotherapy on animals as patients would serve as a prerequisite for human treatment, he said.

"Ideally, we're going to translate this research from the bench-talk to actually implementing it in the clinics and certainly in our lifetime," Lee said. "Cancer affects everyone's life, especially the people that are left behind."