By Jens Dana
In 1971, President Harold B. Lee said he hoped the Eyring Science Center would become a place where students and faculty would make significant contributions to finding a cure for cancer.
Thirty-four years later, members of the BYU Cancer Research Center work alongside graduate and undergraduate students to realize President Lee?s hope, by providing a research-training program for students. The Cancer Research Center is an independent organization with members from diverse departments on campus.
One of the center?s members, Jeff Barrow, who is a professor of physiology and developmental biology, focuses his research on early embryonic development, but his current project has very powerful cancer implications.
?A lot of the genes that have been found that cause cancer, when misregulated, are actually genes that play an important role in embryonic development,? Barrow said.
Michael Stark, one of Barrow?s colleagues, said understanding the functions that genes play in embryonic development is essential to eventually finding a cure for cancer.
?Many genes are active in the developing limbs, gut, heart, muscles and other tissues,? Stark said. ?Interestingly, many of these same genes are genes implicated by cancer. By studying their normal function in development, we hope to explain their abnormal function in many human cancers.?
He said although cancer researchers understand some of the early sequences in cancer development, they don?t fully understand the long-term effects. This is why he and his lab assistants are working to create a living model for studying cancer.
By using cutting-edge lab techniques, BYU research groups plan to use mouse stem cells to create embryos that are prone to develop various forms of cancer as they grow into adult mice.
Because mice are very similar to humans, they would provide valuable models of cancerous tumor cells that researchers would be able to observe to identify consistent sets of mutation over time, Barrow said.
Keri Low, a second-year graduate student, said the mice research at BYU could go a long way in explaining cancer and eventually finding a way to treat it.
?Once those techniques are fine-tuned, we?ll have some interesting ways to treat birth defects and alignments in nonintrusive and less painful ways than we do now,? Low said. ?This is a small chunk of the puzzle, but that?s what it takes ? a huge army of scientists working together to put together that puzzle.?
