A simple ten-minute universal cancer test that can be detected by the human eye or an electronic device - published in Nature Communications (Dec 2018) by the Trau lab at the University of Queensland. Red indicates the presence of cancerous cells and blue doesn't.
Matt Trau, a professor of chemistry at the University of Queensland, stunned the science world back in December when the prestigious journal Nature Communications published his lab's discovery about a unique property of cancer DNA that could lead to a simple, cheap, and accurate test to detect any type of cancer in under 10 minutes.
No one believed it. I didn't believe it. I thought, "Gosh, okay, maybe it's a fluke."
Trau granted very few interviews in the wake of the news, but he recently opened up to leapsmag about the significance of this promising early research. Here is his story in his own words, as told to Editor-in-Chief Kira Peikoff.
There's been an incredible explosion of knowledge over the past 20 years, particularly since the genome was sequenced. The area of diagnostics has a tremendous amount of promise and has caught our lab's interest. If you catch cancer early, you can improve survival rates to as high as 98 percent, sometimes even now surpassing that.
My lab is interested in devices to improve the trajectory of cancer patients. So, once people get diagnosed, can we get really sophisticated information about the molecular origins of the disease, and can we measure it in real time? And then can we match that with the best treatment and monitor it in real time, too?
I think those approaches, also coupled with immunotherapy, where one dreams of monitoring the immune system simultaneously with the disease progress, will be the future.
But currently, the methodologies for cancer are still pretty old. So, for example, let's talk about biopsies in general. Liquid biopsy just means using a blood test or a urine test, rather than extracting out a piece of solid tissue. Now consider breast cancer. Still, the cutting-edge screening method is mammography or the physical interrogation for lumps. This has had a big impact in terms of early detection and awareness, but it's still primitive compared to interrogating, forensically, blood samples to look at traces of DNA.
Large machines like CAT scans, PET scans, MRIs, are very expensive and very subjective in terms of the operator. They don't look at the root causes of the cancer. Cancer is caused by changes in DNA. These can be changes in the hard drive of the DNA (the genomic changes) or changes in the apps that the DNA are running (the epigenetics and the transcriptomics).
We don't look at that now, even though we have, emerging, all of these technologies to do it, and those technologies are getting so much cheaper. I saw some statistics at a conference just a few months ago that, in the United States, less than 1 percent of cancer patients have their DNA interrogated. That's the current state-of-the-art in the modern medical system.
Professor Matt Trau, a cancer researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia.
(Courtesy)
Blood, as the highway of the body, is carrying all of this information. Cancer cells, if they are present in the body, are constantly getting turned over. When they die, they release their contents into the blood. Many of these cells end up in the urine and saliva. Having technologies that can forensically scan the highways looking for evidence of cancer is little bit like looking for explosives at the airport. That's very valuable as a security tool.
The trouble is that there are thousands of different types of cancer. Going back to breast cancer, there's at least a dozen different types, probably more, and each of them change the DNA (the hard drive of the disease) and the epigenetics (or the RAM memory). So one of the problems for diagnostics in cancer is to find something that is a signature of all cancers. That's been a really, really, really difficult problem.
Ours was a completely serendipitous discovery. What we found in the lab was this one marker that just kept coming up in all of the types of breast cancers we were studying.
No one believed it. I didn't believe it. I thought, "Gosh, okay, maybe it's a fluke, maybe it works just for breast cancer." So we went on to test it in prostate cancer, which is also many different types of diseases, and it seemed to be working in all of those. We then tested it further in lymphoma. Again, many different types of lymphoma. It worked across all of those. We tested it in gastrointestinal cancer. Again, many different types, and still, it worked, but we were skeptical.
Then we looked at cell lines, which are cells that have come from previous cancer patients, that we grow in the lab, but are used as model experimental systems. We have many of those cell lines, both ones that are cancerous, and ones that are healthy. It was quite remarkable that the marker worked in all of the cancer cell lines and didn't work in the healthy cell lines.
What could possibly be going on?
Well, imagine DNA as a piece of string, that's your hard drive. Epigenetics is like the beads that you put on that string. Those beads you can take on and off as you wish and they control which apps are run, meaning which genetic programs the cell runs. We hypothesized that for cancer, those beads cluster together, rather than being randomly distributed across the string.
Ultimately, I see this as something that would be like a pregnancy test you could take at your doctor's office.
The implications of this are profound. It means that DNA from cancer folds in water into three-dimensional structures that are very different from healthy cells' DNA. It's quite literally the needle in a haystack. Because when you do a liquid biopsy for early detection of cancer, most of the DNA from blood contains a vast abundance of healthy DNA. And that's not of interest. What's of interest is to find the cancerous DNA. That's there only in trace.
Once we figured out what was going on, we could easily set up a system to detect the trace cancerous DNA. It binds to gold nanoparticles in water and changes color. The test takes 10 minutes, and you can detect it by eye. Red indicates cancer and blue doesn't.
We're very, very excited about where we go from here. We're starting to test the test on a greater number of cancers, in thousands of patient samples. We're looking to the scientific community to engage with us, and we're getting a really good response from groups around the world who are supplying more samples to us so we can test this more broadly.
We also are very interested in testing how early can we go with this test. Can we detect cancer through a simple blood test even before there are any symptoms whatsoever? If so, we might be able to convert a cancer diagnosis to something almost as good as a vaccine.
Of course, we have to watch what are called false positives. We don't want to be detecting people as positives when they don't have cancer, and so the technology needs to improve there. We see this version as the iPhone 1. We're interested in the iPhone 2, 3, 4, getting better and better.
Ultimately, I see this as something that would be like a pregnancy test you could take at your doctor's office. If it came back positive, your doctor could say, "Look, there's some news here, but actually, it's not bad news, it's good news. We've caught this so early that we will be able to manage this, and this won't be a problem for you."
If this were to be in routine use in the medical system, countless lives could be saved. Cancer is now becoming one of the biggest killers in the world. We're talking millions upon millions upon millions of people who are affected. This really motivates our work. We might make a difference there.
Today's podcast episode features Doug Drysdale, CEO of Cybin, a company that is leading innovations in psilocybin, mushrooms that may help people with anxiety and depression.
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These mushrooms have been used for religious, spiritual and medicinal purposes for thousands of years, but only in the past several decades have scientists brought psychedelics into the lab to enhance them and maximize their therapeutic value.
Today’s podcast guest, Doug Drysdale, is doing important work to lead this effort. Drysdale is the CEO of a company called Cybin that has figured out how to make psilocybin more potent, so it can be administered in smaller doses without side effects.
The natural form of psilocybin has been studied increasingly in the realm of mental health. Taking doses of these mushrooms appears to help people with anxiety and depression by spurring the development of connections in the brain, an example of neuroplasticity. The process basically shifts the adult brain from being fairly rigid like dried clay into a malleable substance like warm wax - the state of change that's constantly underway in the developing brains of children.
Neuroplasticity in adults seems to unlock some of our default ways of of thinking, the habitual thought patterns that’ve been associated with various mental health problems. Some promising research suggests that psilocybin causes a reset of sorts. It makes way for new, healthier thought patterns.
So what is Drysdale’s secret weapon to bring even more therapeutic value to psilocybin? It’s a process called deuteration. It focuses on the hydrogen atoms in psilocybin. These atoms are very light and don’t stick very well to carbon, which is another atom in psilocybin. As a result, our bodies can easily breaks down the bonds between the hydrogen and carbon atoms. For many people, that means psilocybin gets cleared from the body too quickly, before it can have a therapeutic benefit.
In deuteration, scientists do something simple but ingenious: they replace the hydrogen atoms with a molecule called deuterium. It’s twice as heavy as hydrogen and forms tighter bonds with the carbon. Because these pairs are so rock-steady, they slow down the rate at which psilocybin is metabolized, so it has more sustained effects on our brains.
Cybin isn’t Drysdale’s first go around at this - far from it. He has over 30 years of experience in the healthcare sector. During this time he’s raised around $4 billion of both public and private capital, and has been named Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Before Cybin, he was the founding CEO of a pharmaceutical company called Alvogen, leading it from inception to around $500 million in revenues, across 35 countries. Drysdale has also been the head of mergers and acquisitions at Actavis Group, leading 15 corporate acquisitions across three continents.
In this episode, Drysdale walks us through the promising research of his current company, Cybin, and the different therapies he’s developing for anxiety and depression based not just on psilocybin but another psychedelic compound found in plants called DMT. He explains how they seem to have such powerful effects on the brain, as well as the potential for psychedelics to eventually support other use cases, including helping us strive toward higher levels of well-being. He goes on to discuss his views on mindfulness and lifestyle factors - such as optimal nutrition - that could help bring out hte best in psychedelics.
Show links:
Doug Drysdale full bio
Doug Drysdale twitter
Cybin website
Cybin development pipeline
Cybin's promising phase 2 research on depression
Johns Hopkins psychedelics research and psilocybin research
Mets owner Steve Cohen invests in psychedelic therapies
Doug Drysdale, CEO of Cybin
Immune cells battle an infection.
Measuring immune resilience
The researchers measured immune resilience in two ways. The first is based on the relative quantities of two types of immune cells, CD4+ T cells and CD8+ T cells. CD4+ T cells coordinate the immune system’s response to pathogens and are often used to measure immune health (with higher levels typically suggesting a stronger immune system). However, in 2021, the researchers found that a low level of CD8+ T cells (which are responsible for killing damaged or infected cells) is also an important indicator of immune health. In fact, patients with high levels of CD4+ T cells and low levels of CD8+ T cells during SARS-CoV-2 and HIV infection were the least likely to develop severe COVID and AIDS.
Individuals with optimal levels of immune resilience were more likely to live longer.
In the same 2021 study, the researchers identified a second measure of immune resilience that involves two gene expression signatures correlated with an infected person’s risk of death. One of the signatures was linked to a higher risk of death; it includes genes related to inflammation — an essential process for jumpstarting the immune system but one that can cause considerable damage if left unbridled. The other signature was linked to a greater chance of survival; it includes genes related to keeping inflammation in check. These genes help the immune system mount a balanced immune response during infection and taper down the response after the threat is gone. The researchers found that participants who expressed the optimal combination of genes lived longer.
Immune resilience and longevity
The researchers assessed levels of immune resilience in nearly 50,000 participants of different ages and with various types of challenges to their immune systems, including acute infections, chronic diseases, and cancers. Their evaluation demonstrated that individuals with optimal levels of immune resilience were more likely to live longer, resist HIV and influenza infections, resist recurrence of skin cancer after kidney transplant, survive COVID infection, and survive sepsis.
However, a person’s immune resilience fluctuates all the time. Study participants who had optimal immune resilience before common symptomatic viral infections like a cold or the flu experienced a shift in their gene expression to poor immune resilience within 48 hours of symptom onset. As these people recovered from their infection, many gradually returned to the more favorable gene expression levels they had before. However, nearly 30% who once had optimal immune resilience did not fully regain that survival-associated profile by the end of the cold and flu season, even though they had recovered from their illness.
Intriguingly, some people who are 90+ years old still have optimal immune resilience, suggesting that these individuals’ immune systems have an exceptional capacity to control inflammation and rapidly restore proper immune balance.
This could suggest that the recovery phase varies among people and diseases. For example, young female sex workers who had many clients and did not use condoms — and thus were repeatedly exposed to sexually transmitted pathogens — had very low immune resilience. However, most of the sex workers who began reducing their exposure to sexually transmitted pathogens by using condoms and decreasing their number of sex partners experienced an improvement in immune resilience over the next 10 years.
Immune resilience and aging
The researchers found that the proportion of people with optimal immune resilience tended to be highest among the young and lowest among the elderly. The researchers suggest that, as people age, they are exposed to increasingly more health conditions (acute infections, chronic diseases, cancers, etc.) which challenge their immune systems to undergo a “respond-and-recover” cycle. During the response phase, CD8+ T cells and inflammatory gene expression increase, and during the recovery phase, they go back down.
However, over a lifetime of repeated challenges, the immune system is slower to recover, altering a person’s immune resilience. Intriguingly, some people who are 90+ years old still have optimal immune resilience, suggesting that these individuals’ immune systems have an exceptional capacity to control inflammation and rapidly restore proper immune balance despite the many respond-and-recover cycles that their immune systems have faced.
Public health ramifications could be significant. Immune cell and gene expression profile assessments are relatively simple to conduct, and being able to determine a person’s immune resilience can help identify whether someone is at greater risk for developing diseases, how they will respond to treatment, and whether, as well as to what extent, they will recover.
