Most people will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, according to Katarzyna Slowinska, an associate professor of biochemistry at California State University, Long Beach.
But there is some hope, especially with new drug research that works to find better ways to administer cancer-fighting drugs without harmful side affects and the bodys naturally produced collagen could be the answer, Slowinska said.
My research is in bio material and collagen peptides, Slowinska said. (With collagen), it is a functional material. It is very strong and flexible, and we want to use what biology has already developed and use it for a different function.
For the last eight years, Slowinska has taught biochemistry at CSULB and was awarded a four-year $433,500 grant from the National Institute of Healths National Institute of General Medical Sciences to continue research of short, triple helix strands of amino acids, called peptides, to serve as drug nanocarriers.
Before teaching at CSULB, she received her PhD in physical chemistry from University of California, Berkeley, and worked as a research chemist at GE Global Research Center in New York.
Slowinska said she hopes her research can eventually help those taking the widely used chemotherapy drug Paclitaxel which has some major side effects. Her research shows that the drug could be administered using collagen-based materials to carry and release the cancer-fighting drug directly at or inside of tumor cells, she said.
We plan to work on this, Slowinska said. We already know how peptides come out of the gel, but now we have to put the pieces together to find out if it will work.
This therapeutic way to administer chemotherapy drugs keeps the drug from crystalizing in a persons blood, she added, which is a common side effect due to it being water soluble.
We can add functionality to it, Slowinska added. Collagen gel can be injected with a syringe in the proximity of the tumor. You can inject the collagen and design an anchor to control the rate at which the drug is leaking out of the gel.
As people begin living longer lives, their chances of being diagnosed with cancer increases with every year, so the importance of cancer research is tremendous, she added.
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CSULB Professor's Research Shows Collagen Could Treat Cancer