October 20, 2010
The Physics of Cancer
Robert Austin
Professor of Physics Princeton University
The Physics of Cancer
Robert Austin
Professor of Physics Princeton University
Minutes of the Sixth Meeting of the 69th Year
President Varrin called to order, at the Convocation Room at the Friend Center at 10:15 a.m., the 6th meeting of the 69th year, to an estimated attendance of 110. Don Edwards led the invocation. Owen Leach read that part of his minutes relevant to last week's talk on the Seduction a la Francaise by Elaine Sciolino. Bob Hopkins introduced his guest, Dr. Brown Elmes. An announcement of brochures, describing the meeting of the YMCA Executive Club, on Wednesday Nov. 3, was made by Guy Dean. Bruno Walmsley initiated a short tutorial to introduce new members to the Old Guard Web-Site. Unfortunately, restrictions of the Friend Center WI FI system prevented access to the Web-Site at that time.
Ruth Miller introduced the speaker, Robert H. Austin, Professor in the Princeton Department of Physics. Prof. Austin received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1975 from the University of Illinois, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, from 1976 to 1979 when he joined the Princeton faculty. Since then he has studied a wide range of biological physics problems with numerous honors and more than 150 peer reviewed papers.
Prof. Austin, is the Principle Investigator (PI) responsible for the five-year, $15.2 million contract granted October 2009 from the National Cancer Institute [NCI], to create the Princeton Physical Sciences-Oncology Center [PSOC] as part of the Institute's nationwide network of 12 such Centers, all under a contract to explore the driving forces behind the evolution of cancer. The Princeton Center, in collaboration with UC-San Francisco, Johns Hopkins Hospital, UC-Santa Cruz, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California has the goal of "understanding the explosive evolution of cancer under stress, at a deep theoretical and experimental level, by leveraging the strengths of their interdisciplinary team of physicists, engineers, chemists, biochemists and oncologists." Using a physics-based approach, the team intends to better grasp the rules or laws that govern how cancer evolves, which may one day inform entirely new treatment approaches.
Prof. Austin's talk and PowerPoint presentation, on the Physics of Cancer, highlighted the challenge of trying to "do something different" in a medical field in which "people are living longer than they used to live, but in the end, the cancer wins most of the time." The contract award, and the task defined by that award, reminded Prof. Austin of Goldilock's tale of getting enough energy at "breakfast" to explore all the rooms of an unknown house in order to find what was "just right." In this case, "just right" is how to match the expertise and experience of the multi-disciplinary Princeton Center team, to the goals of the NCI Network.
Cancer is a disease that attacks, and changes the cells of the human body, and has produced mortality curves as a function of time that are "flat to rising" for all types of cancer. There are mysteries in cancer occurrence. As described by Prof. Austin, Japanese women have the lowest rate of breast cancer in the world, yet if they move to the US, their breast cancer rate rises to the US value. Chinese men in rural areas have the lowest prostate cancer rate in the world, but again this is not true for such men when they move to the US. There are also many mysteries in initially successful cancer treatments. There are patients who only exhibit cancer after 60 years of life, and then receive successful chemotherapy and surgery, but the same cancer can sometimes reoccur after 60 weeks, and in a form that is now resistant to the same chemotherapy that originally destroyed the cancer. Clearly the solution to such important medical issues, are not straightforward, given the complexity of the human genome with 3 billion base pairs, and the complexity of the 1014 cells in the body whose phenotypes are defined through genome expression of proteins in the local cellular environment. For Darwin, the 5 years of research spent on the isolated Galapagos Islands, led to the model of Evolution driven by Natural Selection that accounts for the diversity of our earth over hundreds of million of years. What can the Princeton Physical Sciences Oncology Center do in its 5 years of contract support, and connection with the other NCI centers, to meet the goals of the NCI network?
In the first year, of their 5 year contract, the Princeton Center explored a non-linear model of cancer production through stress in a small local population of cells by a model of Fast Evolution driven by Natural Selection of those cancer cells that survived under that stress. As described by Prof. Austin, the first experimental model, set up in a "clean room" at Princeton, was on the surface of a 1"x1" computer chip with micro-fabricated channels connecting each of the 2000 "Galapagos Islands" to individual food sources, to poison sources, and to neighbors. The living species under study in the first experiments were not body cells but were Bacteria, the food was something that the Bacteria needed to survive, the poison was an established Anti-Biotic, Cipro, and the community connections were surface channels on the chip. In 20 hours, rather than the hundreds of million of years required by the Darwin Model, it was found that the new Bacteria had evolved to a Bacteria that was now immune to the "poison" of the Cipro Anti-Biotic! These initial experimental results and their agreement with a theoretical model of the flow dynamics, and community interactions, of random small systems suggested that Fast Evolution can indeed play a role in both cancer production and control. It suggests: (1) that cancer is not a disease, but the tail end of mutational mechanics, described by Fast Evolution in a small community of random cells under stress; (2) that continual attempts to destroy cancer may only generate cancer! The research initiated by the Princeton Physical Sciences Oncology team, and described so well by Prof. Austin, is clearly on the right track with a physics-based approach, that will "better grasp the rules or laws that govern how cancer evolves, and which may, one day, inform entirely new treatment approaches"—for example, drugs that are effective by "not just being killers". Prof. Austin's talk ended at 11:00 a.m., and was followed by a half hour of 17 questions from an enthusiastic audience.
Respectfully submitted,
George D. Cody
Ruth Miller introduced the speaker, Robert H. Austin, Professor in the Princeton Department of Physics. Prof. Austin received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1975 from the University of Illinois, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, from 1976 to 1979 when he joined the Princeton faculty. Since then he has studied a wide range of biological physics problems with numerous honors and more than 150 peer reviewed papers.
Prof. Austin, is the Principle Investigator (PI) responsible for the five-year, $15.2 million contract granted October 2009 from the National Cancer Institute [NCI], to create the Princeton Physical Sciences-Oncology Center [PSOC] as part of the Institute's nationwide network of 12 such Centers, all under a contract to explore the driving forces behind the evolution of cancer. The Princeton Center, in collaboration with UC-San Francisco, Johns Hopkins Hospital, UC-Santa Cruz, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California has the goal of "understanding the explosive evolution of cancer under stress, at a deep theoretical and experimental level, by leveraging the strengths of their interdisciplinary team of physicists, engineers, chemists, biochemists and oncologists." Using a physics-based approach, the team intends to better grasp the rules or laws that govern how cancer evolves, which may one day inform entirely new treatment approaches.
Prof. Austin's talk and PowerPoint presentation, on the Physics of Cancer, highlighted the challenge of trying to "do something different" in a medical field in which "people are living longer than they used to live, but in the end, the cancer wins most of the time." The contract award, and the task defined by that award, reminded Prof. Austin of Goldilock's tale of getting enough energy at "breakfast" to explore all the rooms of an unknown house in order to find what was "just right." In this case, "just right" is how to match the expertise and experience of the multi-disciplinary Princeton Center team, to the goals of the NCI Network.
Cancer is a disease that attacks, and changes the cells of the human body, and has produced mortality curves as a function of time that are "flat to rising" for all types of cancer. There are mysteries in cancer occurrence. As described by Prof. Austin, Japanese women have the lowest rate of breast cancer in the world, yet if they move to the US, their breast cancer rate rises to the US value. Chinese men in rural areas have the lowest prostate cancer rate in the world, but again this is not true for such men when they move to the US. There are also many mysteries in initially successful cancer treatments. There are patients who only exhibit cancer after 60 years of life, and then receive successful chemotherapy and surgery, but the same cancer can sometimes reoccur after 60 weeks, and in a form that is now resistant to the same chemotherapy that originally destroyed the cancer. Clearly the solution to such important medical issues, are not straightforward, given the complexity of the human genome with 3 billion base pairs, and the complexity of the 1014 cells in the body whose phenotypes are defined through genome expression of proteins in the local cellular environment. For Darwin, the 5 years of research spent on the isolated Galapagos Islands, led to the model of Evolution driven by Natural Selection that accounts for the diversity of our earth over hundreds of million of years. What can the Princeton Physical Sciences Oncology Center do in its 5 years of contract support, and connection with the other NCI centers, to meet the goals of the NCI network?
In the first year, of their 5 year contract, the Princeton Center explored a non-linear model of cancer production through stress in a small local population of cells by a model of Fast Evolution driven by Natural Selection of those cancer cells that survived under that stress. As described by Prof. Austin, the first experimental model, set up in a "clean room" at Princeton, was on the surface of a 1"x1" computer chip with micro-fabricated channels connecting each of the 2000 "Galapagos Islands" to individual food sources, to poison sources, and to neighbors. The living species under study in the first experiments were not body cells but were Bacteria, the food was something that the Bacteria needed to survive, the poison was an established Anti-Biotic, Cipro, and the community connections were surface channels on the chip. In 20 hours, rather than the hundreds of million of years required by the Darwin Model, it was found that the new Bacteria had evolved to a Bacteria that was now immune to the "poison" of the Cipro Anti-Biotic! These initial experimental results and their agreement with a theoretical model of the flow dynamics, and community interactions, of random small systems suggested that Fast Evolution can indeed play a role in both cancer production and control. It suggests: (1) that cancer is not a disease, but the tail end of mutational mechanics, described by Fast Evolution in a small community of random cells under stress; (2) that continual attempts to destroy cancer may only generate cancer! The research initiated by the Princeton Physical Sciences Oncology team, and described so well by Prof. Austin, is clearly on the right track with a physics-based approach, that will "better grasp the rules or laws that govern how cancer evolves, and which may, one day, inform entirely new treatment approaches"—for example, drugs that are effective by "not just being killers". Prof. Austin's talk ended at 11:00 a.m., and was followed by a half hour of 17 questions from an enthusiastic audience.
Respectfully submitted,
George D. Cody