National Cancer Institute
A problem as complex as fighting the constellation of diseases that make up what we collectively call cancer should always welcome new ideas, perspectives, and approaches.
In workshops throughout 2008, NCI assembled groups of biologists, physicists, chemists, and others to come up with new scientific approaches to age-old quandaries. Biologists, for example, are familiar with complex changes in cell biology, while physicists can apply their knowledge of how discrete entities interact to a system where millions of cells are bumping into each other in the tumor microenvironment. Chemists understand the reactive potential of carcinogens and can bring a knowledge of that reactivity to yield a better understanding of the cancer initiation process.
At an October 2008 NCI-sponsored meeting on the physical sciences in oncology, Philip LeDuc, Ph.D., associate professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, discussed cellular decision-making processes from a mechanical perspective. “Two important areas [of interest to us] are signal integration — how does a system respond to two distinct signals — and noise. Noise can be a reason a system functions well, as perturbations can help maintain system functionality as seen, for example, in dormant cancer cells.”
Princeton University biophysicist Robert Austin, Ph.D., notes that physics has evolved as a discipline and that physicists have learned to work with more and more complex systems. “We started out working with hydrogen atoms, very simple things, but we are now learning how to work with complex multi-bodied problems,” he said. “So I think it’s sort of natural for a physicist to go over into this area here because cancer, in my mind, is a very complex multibodied interaction phenomenon.”
Physicists can bring to cancer their insights on the properties of matter, including the study of time, energy, heat, and even the evolution of cells. Paul Davies, Ph.D., director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, even posits there may be significance in the fact that cancer cells are “squishy.”
“This is obviously something rather basic and yet it seems to me that it is not fully understood. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could cure cancer just by making those cells a bit stiffer? It just might be a matter of giving them some glue or something and making them stiffer and stickier — maybe something that would change their mechanical properties…”
While theoretical physics is not a field normally associated with cancer research, the field of biophysics is not new to NCI. The Institute has a Structural Biophysics Laboratory that focuses on solution structural biology and biophysics aimed at understanding and regulating the mechanism of action of proteins and nucleic acids. The laboratory has a very strong interdisciplinary drug design effort, which encompasses synthetic and mechanistic chemistry, structure-based design and modeling, confocal microscopy, and biochemical and biological mechanisms.
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