Colleges against cancer

UB is teaming up with Cornell University to stop cancer in its tracks.

Gail Seigel, principal investigator for the Center for Hearing and Deafness at UB, has joined the new Center on the Microenvironment and Metastasis, a cancer research center based at Cornell.

The project has significant potential to answer some very monumental questions on the nature of the disease, Seigel said.

'The whole project is very interesting,' she said. 'It's an approach where they combine people doing biomedical engineering and people doing cell biology, to see if we can figure out what it is that makes a cancer cell spread throughout the body.'

The new center – funded by the National Cancer institute – is one of 12 new cancer research centers across the nation.

Seigel will join the team of biomedical specialists, led by Michael King, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell, that will take innovative approaches to study the progression of cancer throughout the body, she said.

The team's approach will focus heavily on physical and quantitative aspects of the disease, while still taking into account the biological perspective, Seigel said.

'There's a biology to [cancer], but there is also a physical aspect, with molecules bumping into each other, cells bumping into each other and cells bouncing against the walls of the blood vessel,' Seigel said. 'Those are the things that the engineers are studying. It's really great to combine the two areas, and that's what gives this project its strength.'

Although the majority of the research will be done at Cornell, Seigel will remain at her lab at UB, communicating her progress and results with the rest of the research team by telephone and e-mail.

'I'm what they call a subcontractor on it,' Seigel said. 'There will be times where I'll travel there to meet with them, and we'll have teleconferences, but I'll be doing all of the research here.'

Seigel's work will focus specifically on the study of cancer stem cells – cancer cells that posses the ability to divide and multiply into all of the cell types that make up a tumor.

'There are cells that linger, that maybe aren't killed by the chemotherapy, and those are the cells that I'm studying,' Seigel said. 'They act like stem cells. It's a very small percentage of the tumor, but all you need is one to survive and it will go on and spread.'

Cancer stem cells cause cancer to return in a patient who was in remission. The study of these cells is essential in determining how to stop cancer from spreading, she said.

'There's been a lot of success,' Seigel said. 'New treatments are coming out all the time. We are making a lot of progress and people are living longer with it.'

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