UA researchers among handful using Îantibody libraries' to find and treat breast cancer tumors

Every year, an expected 40,000 women will die of breast cancer, but some UA researchers and students might be on the way to finding a better treatment for the disease.

Leah Tatum, a biochemistry senior, is working with breast cancer cells and naturally-produced antibodies to develop a new treatment.

Through "immunotherapy," the antibodies target specific cancer cells to determine which bind best and could fight against breast tumors, Tatum, who joined the project one and a half years ago through the Undergraduate Biology Research Program, said.

With Michelle Maly, an Arizona Cancer Center research technician, Tatum uses "antibody libraries" to keep track of which antibodies successfully bind with the cancer cells.

Breast cancer tumors contain something that normal tissue does not, so the goal is to find antibodies that bind with cancer cells, but do not bind with normal tissue, Maly said.

There are only a handful of researchers doing this kind of study in the United States, but Julia Coronella-Wood, a research assistant professor of medicine, said that using antibodies to fight cancer is a promising idea. It is also less harmful to the rest of the patient's body.

Immunotherapy treatment for breast cancer would be less devastating to the body than the more commonly used chemotherapy treatment, Coronella-Wood said.

Chemotherapy destroys all other cells in the body, leading to bone marrow and hair loss, vomiting and anemia.

"A thousand drugs go into the pipelines and one or two come out the other end, so there's no guarantee," Coronella-Wood said. "But all the signs are good."

Antibodies, on the other hand, specifically target the cancer cells, and works with the body's own immune system, Tatum said.

And the same antibodies that Coronella-Wood, Maly and Tatum work with can also be used to diagnose breast cancer tumors.

Whether the antibodies would be more effective than mammograms is still up for debate, Coronella-Wood said.

Coronella-Wood, who leads the research, has a contract with a pharmaceutical company called IDEC to come up with antibody results that would lead to the creation of a drug to treat breast cancer.