Scientists Use Firefly Gene To Track Treatments In Lymphoma/leukemia

Main Category: Lymphoma / Leukemia / Myeloma
Also Included In: Cancer / Oncology
Article Date: 15 Feb 2008 - 2:00 PDT


Visions of fireflies lighting up a summer evening might seem far off right now, but not for some scientists. They're using fireflies year round to help find new medical treatments. Those little bugs could make a big difference when it comes to a certain kind of cancer.

As a dermatologist, Dr. Julio Cruz is trained to look for signs of trouble on the skin. But no amount of training could prepare him for the spots he found on his mother. They turned out to be signs of adult T-cell lymphoma and leukemia - a cancer for which Dr. Cruz knew there are very few effective treatments.

"For me, it was especially painful because of the fact that I have a sense that I want and needed to do something else," says Cruz.

At the time, he couldn't. Today, a foundation started in his mother's name helps to fund research on fireflies. Dr. Thomas Rosol and his team at Ohio State University's Comprehensive Cancer Center use genes from fireflies to make cancer cells glow. The idea is to use the light to track cancer drugs inside the body to see how well they're killing cancer cells and if any have survived.

"The light is produced only by living cancer cells, and so when we're doing studies to try to kill cancer with specific chemotherapeutic agents, it's critical for us to be able to count how many living cells remain," says Rosol.

Especially in diseases like adult T-cell lymphoma and leukemia - a disease that often doesn't show any signs until the cancer is widespread.

"We can image as few as 50 tumor cells in a living animal, so we don't have to wait until the tumors are end stage. This helps us really develop treatments that work early in cancer and that's going to be important for cancer patients," says Rosol.

Right now it's only being tested in the lab, but someday tiny fireflies could play a big role in saving human lives. Ohio State cancer researchers tested two drugs using this new technique and they dramatically improved the life span and health of the animals in the study.* They plan to use it to test other therapies in the future.

*Novel Bioluminescent Mouse Model and Effective Therapy For Adult T-Cell Leukemia/Lymphoma
American Association for Cancer Research 2007; 67: (24) December 15, 2007
http://www.aacrjournals.org

Ohio State University's Comprehensive Cancer Center

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