New Ovarian Cancer Treatment Receives $2.7 Million Grant: Using Lasers To Target Drug-resistant Cells

Recently, the Spring Biomedical Physics Laboratory at Northeastern University received a $2.7 million grant to develop a new treatment for ovarian cancer. The approach focuses on using lasers to find and target chemotherapy-resistant cancer cells and boost the patient's immune system.
According to the American Cancer Society, ovarian cancer causes more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive system. It ranks fifth in female cancer deaths and is often not diagnosed until it is advanced. Women with advanced ovarian cancer have to undergo surgery to remove cancerous tumors visible in the pelvis or abdomen, or undergo high doses of chemotherapy, all treatment options that can be very painful for patients.
However, Northeastern University's development of a laser to target drug-resistant cells could be a breakthrough.
Bryan Q. Spring, an associate professor of biomedical physics at Northeastern University, said that they are using light to power a therapy and also to examine tumors.
The $2.7 million online grant was awarded to Spring's lab, in collaboration with MD Anderson Cancer Center and Heiko Enderling's lab at Moffitt Cancer Center, for a research project titled "Graded Photo-Immunotherapy Using Low-Dose Immunostimulation for the Treatment of Ovarian Cancer." a research project.
The grant could help realize light-activated therapies that have already been tried in pilot clinical trials, with one drug undergoing phase III testing. The advantage of photodynamic therapy, or photoimmunotherapy, is that in addition to killing cancer cells, it activates the immune system in preparation for subsequent immunotherapy.
This optical treatment has the potential to protect benign immune cells and even stimulate their proliferation and activity to engulf the cancer cells, while removing the "bad" tumor cells that help the cancer evade the immune system.
During the treatment, antibodies against the cancer cells carry a photoactive molecule of non-toxic chemicals. When they are exposed to light, the chemical molecule captures the light's energy and produces a toxic reaction in a very localized area that can harm even chemotherapy-resistant cancer cells.
Another goal of the Spring lab is to develop a miniature microscope that can go inside the human body and use light to examine tumors. The device would use the energy of very short pulses of light transmitted through optical fibers for imaging. Currently, the device is large, not portable, and costs between $50,000 and $100,000 dollars. Instead, his lab is working on a lightweight, portable laser device that will cost about $10,000 dollars.
"We can stain cancer in vivo and identify proteins available on the cell surface. Then select antibodies to target proteins expressed by the tumor that are different from the background tissue," Spring says, "and we can use that to try to deliver the photosensitizer directly to the tumor and avoid off-target damage."