Attack Cancer, Not Patients

Chemotherapy.  For the one-in-three Americans who will be affected by cancer it’s a medicine that might be described as “worse than the disease.” Hair loss, nausea, fatigue…anyone who has taken this journey on their own or with a loved one knows the drill. It’s enough to make you sick…except you already are.

Chemo has this problem because of the way it works – by attacking rapidly dividing cells. The trouble (and the negative side effects) come when the chemo can’t tell the difference between rapidly dividing tumor cells and rapidly dividing healthy cells.

But Auburn researchers think there is a better way to treat cancer.

Within the Auburn University Research Initiative in Cancer (AURIC), faculty from across campus are working together to solve the problem of “scorched earth” chemotherapy. They believe that cancer treatments can be focused to only attack the tumor cells and are currently investigating very targeted treatments with the goal of making the negative side effects of chemo a thing of the past.

For example, Dr. Bruce Smith’s work asks the question, “What if a virus could actually make you better?” He is working with a virus specifically designed to only infect tumor cells. Viruses – like the common cold virus – make you sick by entering one of the cells lining your nose and throat and making copies of itself until it overpowers and kills the cell, releasing millions of copies of itself to do the same thing to other cells.  When the cold virus does this, you get cold symptoms. 

Dr. Smith is working on a virus that will only infect tumor cells and be harmless to any non-tumor cells in the patient. These tumor-attacking viruses would seek and destroy cancer cells no matter where they were located in the body while totally ignoring other healthy cells.

However, measuring the effectiveness of treatments to kill cancer cells while not harming healthy cells is difficult without the right tools. That’s where you can help. One particular package of imaging software currently available would let faculty quickly understand which cells are being attacked by a particular treatment. The pictures produced allow for quicker assessments of treatments as they are developed and tweaked – more easily identifying those that focus on the tumor.

Your gift can make this a reality. As Auburn researchers formulate new treatments, the imaging software that you helped to buy will make sure that the treatments don’t make the patient feel sicker than the disease. 

And that’s medicine we can all take.

Let’s make this a reality, and make sickening chemo a thing of the past. Thanks for giving today and for sharing with others you think will care.