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Inside the cancer cell
On and off switch
The role of enzymes
Transportation systems
Developing designer drugs
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Richard Borch is director of the Purdue University Cancer Center. The renowned cancer researcher redirected his career after losing family members to the disease. (Photo by Tom Campbell) |
Cancer wreaks havoc on millions of Americans each year. Rick Borch knows. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma felled his mother 35 years ago. As with millions annually, the experience was life changing.
This year, approximately 560,000 Americans will die of one of the more than 90 diseases collectively known as cancer. The indiscriminate killer not only affects the victim, but family and friends as well. For Borch, it altered his career choice.
“When my mom was at the end stages of her disease, I spent a lot of time talking to her oncologist,” says Borch, who at the time was a chemist at the University of Minnesota. “I knew nothing about cancer beyond what a normal educated scientist would know.”
After his run-in with cancer, Borch went to medical school, earning his M.D. in 1975. He joined the ranks of cancer researchers and since 1998 has been director of the Purdue University Cancer Center.
Purdue's center is among 61 National Cancer Institute-designated research groups around the nation established as a provision of the 1971 National Cancer Act. More than 70 researchers throughout the university are involved in the center's three scientific programs: Cell Growth and Differentiation; Structural Biology; and Experimental Therapeutics and Diagnostics.
The scientists, including eight from Purdue Agriculture's Department of Biochemistry, have almost as many reasons as there are cancers for choosing this field of research. But they all share a common interest in the disease, and, like Borch, it has transformed their lives.
Inside the cancer cell
“Research in cell growth and differentiation drives the fundamental biology associated with cancer as we try to determine what processes make a cancer cell a cancer cell,” says Borch.
The problem comes when intricate controls that normally slow down or halt cell multiplication or trigger programmed cell death, or apoptosis, aren't present in cancer cells. Purdue's molecular researchers are trying to understand normal cell growth controls and the deviant behavior that allows cancer cells to multiple wildly and to migrate, or metastasize, to other parts of the body.
Biochemistry faculty Harry Charbonneau, Ann Kirchmaier, Scott Briggs, Jill Hutchcroft and Sandra Rossie are among those investigating normal and abnormal cell growth. “The classic dogma right now is that multiple mutations in either tumor suppressor genes or in proto-oncogenes—potential cancer promoters—lead to formation of a tumor,” says Charbonneau. “Cells become cancerous by different mechanisms. That's why there is no one single kind of tumor.”
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