Buckhaults hopes to decode colon cancer mystery
By Scott Waggoner
As if being diagnosed with cancer wasn't unfortunate enough, patients recovering from colon cancer must also face the threat of the disease returning, though a professor at USC is working on a better way to predict
this recurrence.
While a patient may have thought they were free of colon cancer after surgery, there's a chance that the tumor cells have spread to other areas, where doctors can't detect them. This can occur for two reasons,
according to Phillip Buckhaults, an assistant professor in the pathology and biology departments at the School of Medicine. The tumor cells could have either acquired the ability to metastasize to lymph nodes, or the doctor who diagnosed the patient simply didn't examine the lymph nodes thoroughly, Buckhaults said.
"It could mean that you just didn't look hard enough, Buckhaults said. "If you looked at more regional nodes, you might have seen tumor cells."
Buckhaults, who received his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of South Florida, became interested in cancer research after earning his Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology. He was drawn
to the emerging profession by the recent discoveries in molecular biology. Buckhaults completed his post doctoral fellowship in molecular oncology at Johns Hopkins University, where he worked for a cancer geneticist, and now he is a cancer researcher at USC. He primarily focuses on determining what makes cancers malignant or benign.
Decoding the mysteries of cancer isn't an easy task, and Buckhaults's job requires much dedication and time.
"It's a pretty grueling schedule," Buckhaults said of his daily routine. "It's largely occupied with reading and writing papers."
Buckhaults's typical day starts at 5 a.m. when he wakes up. He then reads scientific literature until 7:30, and gets to the lab around 8. From then until 12, he discusses lab results and plans for upcoming experiments with the people who work for him. After reading more literature or writing grants, Buckhaults makes himself available to his employees for any questions. Following this, he will stay in the lab doing experiments or
writing grants until late into the night, as it's not uncommon for him to be in his lab until 11 p.m.
Kim Creek, a professor in the pathology and microbiology departments at the School of Medicine, has worked in the office next to Buckhaults for the past six years, and he knows the type of effort Buckhaults has put into his research.
"He's a dedicated and tireless worker," Creek said ofBuckhaults. "He's an energetic scientist, and the research he conducts is cutting edge and extremely important."
The answer to predicting whether or not colon cancer will return lies in the fields of genetics, according to Buckhaults, who uses what we all learned in high school from Gregor Mendel's experiment with pea pods, to
apply to his research. Buckhaults hopes to one day predict how cancers cells work by examining the genetic makeup of them much like Mendel did.
"We're simply applying that same logic to cancer cells," Buckhaults said. "We're finding the genes that have caused it, and in the future we will be able to look at genes in cancer and predict what they're able to do regardless if we have detected that they have done it already."
The work Buckhaults has done with colon cancer can also be used to help treat other diseases such as melanoma and breast cancers.
"In different cancer types, it's a different constellation of genes that are markers of future good or bad behavior, but the logic is identical," Buckhaults said.
He recently analyzed 75 melanoma patients by sequencing 25 different genes to try and find mutations. Similar to colon cancer, the key to predicting the future depends on the ability to sequence cancer genes, and with the development of new technology, this task is becoming more possible for cancer researchers.
"We now are developing the technical ability to sequence the entire human genome in cancers," Buckhaults said. "What use to take billions of dollars and many researchers to do ten years ago, can now be done by a relatively small lab for a relatively smaller amount of money." RCT
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