Why this Alberta-born oncologist is sending cancer cells to space
Dr. Matthew Strickland collaborating with NASA in research experiment
An Alberta-born researcher is leading a NASA experiment sending cancer cells to space, in the hope of developing new treatments back on earth.
Dr. Matthew Strickland, from Leduc, Alta., is a medical oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and instructor at Harvard Medical School. He recently watched the launch of his science to the International Space Station, to test the effect of microgravity on cancer cells.
He spoke to Edmonton AM's Mark Connolly about the mission on Thursday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You grew up in Leduc. How did you make your way out to Boston?
I was like a lot of Canadian exports, I played hockey, which led me to a junior hockey career. I had an opportunity to go to the U.S. to play hockey, and to study, of course, and then I went on to medical school.
How did you come about this opportunity to work with NASA and get this experiment up in space?
Like many kids, I always wanted to be an astronaut — I can't think of anything more exciting — and I grew up kind of looking toward the stars and the moon. And then as I got a little older and time to go to college, that kind of fell by the wayside and I decided that I really loved biology and science and I wanted to go to medical school and become a physician.
After medical school, there was basically six years of intense training and it wasn't until the end of that intense training period where I could just begin to catch a breath, so to speak, that my wife got me an introduction to aviation flight lesson.
I went up and this childhood passion just came rushing back of aviation and aerospace and space exploration. At that point, I was very close to starting my career as an oncologist but also a cancer researcher and that led me to ask myself, 'Hey, is there a way I could combine my interest of cancer biology and space exploration?'
And it turns out that there's been a decent amount of science done thus far with very interesting insights regarding how cancer behaves in space. And in addition to that, the International Space Station has a lot of laboratory and scientific infrastructure as well as a lot of enthusiasm for collaborating with academic medical institutions.
Tell us more about the research that you're doing on the International Space Station.
As I began to look into what's been done already, there's been a reasonable amount of science experiments focused on cancer done in microgravity. And we noticed some very unique features that microgravity can induce in cancer cells. In some cases, it will accelerate the cancer's trajectory toward becoming a more aggressive cancer. In other cases, it can actually slow down other types of cancer.
From experiments with gastrointestinal cancers, it seems that they become more aggressive and that's the cancer type I focus on. So there's really a unique application here for patients, and this is really my vision, if we could take a sample from a patient who has a new diagnosis with a gastrointestinal cancer and fly it on the International Space Station, my hypothesis is we can accelerate that cancerous trajectory toward whatever destiny it has in store. And if that's more aggressive, then we can deconstruct what the switches are that it turned on to become that aggressive cancer.
If we can understand those switches and we're doing it in a way that we have a glimpse into the future, then the patient in my clinic, of course here on earth, we can make decisions to reverse those switches and to avoid that aggressive cancer and poor outcome in the future.
What was it like watching that rocket take off?
The logistics is that we load our science onto the rocket 48 hours ahead of time so there's a mix of excitement, terror, anxiety [about the weather]. It turned out to be beautiful at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and the launch was 100 per cent successful without delays and about 48 hours later there was a successful docking with the International Space Station.
And so as we speak, the experiment is running and we will recover the experiment in about a total of 35 days after it started.
When will you have an idea whether some of the things you've looked at will come to fruition?
This is really the first experiment of the team that I've assembled and I also want to point out that this has led me to joint efforts with a wonderful colleague of mine whose name is Dr. Aleksandra Stankovic, she's the director of a newly launched MGH Center for Space Medicine Research and this is one of our flagship experiments for this new centre. We will recover the science experiment and we're going to do analysis once we ship it back to MGH to our labs here. And for this experiment, in six to 12 months we're going to have a readout and we're going to start to see some of those unique changes in cancer models taken from patients — of course with informed consent.
The overarching goal here is to bring something that moves the needle for patients in the clinic and that, like anything in cancer research, is going to take a while. I think it could take several years, but we want to make this a reality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from Ken Dawson