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2024 PCF Special Challenge Award (Anonymous)

Isotopic Fingerprinting of Hair to Detect the Presence of Cancer              

Principal Investigators: Kenneth Pienta, MD (Johns Hopkins University), Emma Hammarlund, PhD (Lund University, Sweden)

Co-Investigators: Kazi Julhash Uddin, PhD (Lund University, Sweden), Bruce Trock, PhD, MPH (Johns Hopkins University)

 Description:

  • Isotopic fingerprinting is a highly sensitive technology to track changes in the rate of chemical turnover, even when it originates from a miniscule source (a billion cancer cells) in a much larger biological system (40 trillion cells of the human body). 
  • The relatively faster proliferation rate of cancer cells drives discriminatory utilization of bio-essential molecules such as zinc, iron, sulfur and other elements.
  • Hair acts as the body’s fossil record by incorporating and preserving chemicals the body is using. 
  • The team is applying isotope fingerprinting methodology to study heavy and light isotopes in hair strands, to define a chemical fingerprint of tumor progression that can be used for non-invasive cancer screening and monitoring. 
  • In preliminary studies, the team demonstrated that elemental perturbations in hair could identify individuals with vs. without prostate cancer, with ~94% accuracy.
  • In this project, the team will collect and analyze hair samples from patients undergoing prostate biopsy because of elevated PSA to demonstrate the predictive power of this methodology to detect prostate cancer.
  • They will further explore the biology and cellular mechanisms that lead to elemental perturbations in the body during prostate tissue transformation.
  • The team will also use machine learning to determine elemental features that further improve the detection of prostate cancer.
  • If successful, this project will result in development of a novel noninvasive test for screening of early prostate cancer, and eventually, all cancers, which only requires a small amount of hair.

What this means to patients: Every year, 400,000 men around the world die because they are diagnosed after their prostate cancer has already spread and is incurable by local surgery or radiation. Drs. Pienta and Hammarlund and their team will develop an inexpensive and non-invasive isotopic fingerprint test to detect prostate cancer before it progresses or metastasizes. Because this test only involves a small amount of hair that can be stored indefinitely and sent via regular mail, this test could be deployed to all people, regardless of where they live in the world, saving lives and decreasing the economic burden of cancer.