Groups unite in bladder cancer research
by Dick PetersonPublic Relations
If there’s a biomedical research heaven, you could listen to Dennis Watson, Ph.D., and Nabil Bissada, M.D., and believe they’ve found it. On earth, in Egypt.
From
left are: Drs. Mohamed Ghoneim, Dennis Watson, Arun Seth, Nabil Bissada
and Agah Babanoury.
It’s where the latest equipment and lab space is available, where the time-consuming data collection has already been done, and where a predictable, early onset cancer cows the local population. It’s where the adventure of investigation and discovery into the uncharted mechanisms of human cells can thrive without many of the space-equipment-money limitations that dog scientists in academic medical centers like MUSC.
In Mansoura, Egypt, where irrigation canals etch the fertile Nile Delta region bringing life to the land and urinary bladder cancer to many of the people farming the land, is the Urology and Nephrology Center.
The center’s founder and director, Mohamed Ghoneim, M.D., spoke at MUSC a year ago. On a reciprocal visit, Watson, Bissada, John Vournakis, Ph.D., and University of Toronto scientist, Arun Seth, Ph.D., laid plans for MUSC’s Center for Molecular and Structural Biology and Urological Oncology Group to collaborate with the Mansoura center to study the cellular mechanisms of bladder cancer.
While the Mansoura Urology and Nephrology Center has the patient population, the equipment, the research space and the years of patient data on bladder cancer, it lacks the biomedical research expertise on the molecular level. This is what makes an international research project so appealing, Watson said.
“Bladder cancer presents itself in a unique way in this population,” Watson said. He explained that an organism in the standing water of irrigation canals and ditches is suspected of creating a shift from transitional cancer cells to squamous cells in the bladders of people it infects.
“We want to know if there is a link between the organism, a parasitic worm called Schistosoma haematobium, and what that organism’s role in bladder cancer is,” Watson said.
“People are getting bladder cancer in their 30s and 40s,” Bissada said. “The carcinogenic process is somehow expedited. That’s much earlier than we see it here.” He added that the Urology and Nephrology Center in Mansoura has patient data on the disease from the past 15 to 20 years and it’s computerized. But it’s never been analyzed on a detailed molecular basis.”
The worms have been a reality of life in the Nile Delta region for millennia. They’ve been found in mummies, they carry a disease from snails in the water to humans, they are understood to be a factor in the cancer, but the molecular steps in carcinogenesis has never been studied.
Watson suspects their role to take one of two forms: They may create a change in the micro-environment of the cell, having an indirect, non-genetic effect on genes like pollutants would. Or, they could have a more direct genetic effect where the genetic material of the organism actually causes a repression or change in human genes that results in the cancer.
Vournakis, who is associate director of the Center for Molecular and Structural Biology, explained that once the genetic basis for the disease is established, biomedical researchers will be in a better position to deliver cancer-killing drugs to the tumors.