Rensselaer

Notions of the Capital Region as a scientific Smallbany frustrate Douglas Conklin.

In the University at Albany Cancer Research Center a 9-year-old building that the associate professor blithely termed "Joe Bruno pork" Conklin and his team have earned a patent for identifying a gene as a possible target for breast cancer drugs. The gene has been known as the cause of another disease an immune disorder affecting mostly men.

The patent is the result of years of effort casting a broad net to understand how breast cancer invades a woman's body, experimenting, watching and waiting until "the breast cancer cells tell us what's important to them," as Conklin put it.

The work is no different from that going on at research centers with international reputations, he said.

"It cheeses me off to no end, when somebody (local) says, 'We're collecting money for St. Jude's hospital,'" said Conklin, referring to the well-known children's cancer center in Memphis.

Conklin himself came to Albany by way of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, known for its groundbreaking work on DNA. (He does a mean impression of James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, who directed that lab.)

As blunt as he is in his opinions, Conklin is patient and plainspoken in explaining the complexities of breast cancer research conducted at his lab. His team of 10 scientists are engaged in multiple experiments connected by the common thread of breast cancer.

It was through manipulating the regulation of various genes turning one gene after another "off" to see how cells would function without it that they discovered breast cancer cells die when the Bruton's tyrosene kinase gene is silenced.

BTK is known for its role in X-linked agammaglobulinaemia, a rare immune deficiency disease that affects one in 200,000 newborns, according to the National Institutes of Health. A mutation in the gene destroys the body's immune system response, including the production of antibodies, making even slight infections dangerous. Because the BTK gene is on the X chromosome, women carry it and pass it along to children, but men are almost exclusively the victims.

See the article here:
Quest to solve breast cancer

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