The Nation's Investment in Cancer Research

Dr. Robert Austin and the Physics of Cancer

Robert Austin has spent his career looking at the community aspects of physics and how that relates to biological processes. He hopes to bring some of this community perspective to the field of cancer research. “The communal aspect of the way organisms responded to stress really surprised me and so I began to think about cancer in terms of communities and their response to stress,” Dr. Austin said.

In his lab, he started building micro-habitat patches, “which are complex microenvironments. We discovered that bacteria responded in the microenvironment in a much different way than you would expect from just culturing them in a test tube. We’re realizing that the microenvironment around a cell in your body is very, very important and so I felt there was a connection between what I could do for making microenvironments and maybe trying to understand the way a cancer cell responds to its own microenvironment.”

“I think treating cancer as a disease may be the wrong approach. Take, for instance, antibiotics. What bacteria have done when you try to kill them is simply evolve their way around the antibiotic and do it very rapidly in response to the stress that the system has put on it, and cancer does the same thing. So that approach of trying to kill the cancer may be exactly the wrong thing to do; it just turns on the evolution machine, if I could use that word, and it starts to mutate evermore rapidly to get around that stress.”

“You can live with a tumor. It’s the transition from a tumor which is not invasive to one that is metastatic, which is an invasion. If we could learn to just keep this tumor intact, reasonably well fed, and not under stress so it’s under no evolutionary push to try to escape where it finds itself in trouble might be a more useful approach than trying to kill it or destroy it. Actually feed it, which sounds nuts, but that might actually be a better way to go about it.”

“I think physicists and other people are receptive to the idea that evolution is a very dynamic thing that’s turned up and down in response to stress, maybe in direct ways. That’s a pretty radical statement, but it may be true. So, physicists like that because they have no preconceptions.”