Ancient Wellness Center: ODU researchers are using electric pulses to kill cancer cells. And they say it's working.

Frank Reidy Center for Bioelectrics at Old Dominion University.

Reposted from The Virginia Pilot on July 2, 2018:
https://pilotonline.com/news/local/health/article_317048ce-70dd-11e8-a9b4-877fb0505f15.html

It was 2014, and a post-doctoral researcher working with Stephen Beebe at Old Dominion University came rushing into the professor’s third-floor office with the news.

The liver cancer tumors she had put under the skin of a mouse about two weeks prior had not grown back.

This was what they had hoped for.

For the last dozen or so years, Beebe and his team had been studying a new form of cancer therapy that uses ultra-quick electrical pulses to kill tumor cells.

How fast are they? In the time it takes for your heart to beat once, researchers could generate 3 million of these nanosecond electric pulses.

This wasn’t the first time the same mouse had been given cancerous cells. The first time, Beebe and the student treated the mouse using electric pulses to kill the tumor. A treatment can last anywhere from five to seven minutes, Beebe said. The team can pulse a mouse up to a thousand times to get rid of a cancer tumor using an electrode wired to a bulky machine resembling a 1980s IBM computer.

But what if they put the cancer cells back? Would the pulse create some sort of response in the mouse? What if the mouse’s own immune system did the same work of the electric pulses and attacked the cancer cells?

When the post-doc researcher saw the tumor didn’t grow the second time, she and Beebe knew: The electric pulse must be triggering an immune response, a response that sends the animal’s own cancer-killing cells out to attack.

This was a big deal.

But the discovery in 2014 launched the center into new territory. Their work has shown they can not only kill cancer cells, but create a response that prevents a tumor from growing back. While the center hasn’t gotten federal approval to test their theories on humans, they hope that will come soon, and hope clinical trials will show humans having the same responses to the pulses.The center where Beebe works – the Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics – had for years been using these pulses to treat cancerous cells. They had recently been looking at treating melanoma.

The idea that the body sends out an immune response has been tried with other cancer therapies like radiation or drugs, said Dr. Anthony Welch, a program director at the National Cancer Institute, which has provided grants to the ODU center. The ODU research has a novel hypothesis, he said: that an electric pulse will trigger an immune response.

Still, Welch said, successful results in mice and rats don’t always translate to humans.

“The mouse is not a great predictor of the human situation,” Welch said. “They will have to do human trials before they really have any idea as to whether this is going to repeat in a human.”

That could take years followed by more time before the therapy is federally approved, he said.

“It’s a very cool idea,” Welch said. “It certainly should be followed up with more animal studies and hopefully they can move it into a clinical trial.”

Today, the ODU center is staffed with about 75 people. That includes faculty like Beebe, post-doctoral students and hired technicians, all from across many departments at Old Dominion.

Biochemists. Engineers. Biologists. All working under one roof.

About 23 people worked there when Richard Heller came on as director in 2008.

Heller, a professor and eminent scholar at ODU, focuses his work not necessarily on using pulses to kill cells but as a means to deliver drugs to treat infections. His work goes to show how the center sees more broad applications of pulse electricity in medicine.

He says they can help with brain trauma through deep-brain stimulation. Pulses can be used as a means to deliver DNA proteins to heal wounds, Heller said, or to deliver the same proteins to create blood vessels for someone suffering from ischemia, or a lack of blood supply to a particular organ.

“Every day, you go and talk to somebody and essentially a new idea shows up,” Heller said of the center. “I think the potential is endless. It’s so way beyond cancer.”

Those at ODU familiar with the center say few on campus or in Norfolk realize what’s happening right in their backyard.

There are reasons to pay attention. Last year, the university received $42 million in stock from a California company called Pulse Biosciences in exchange for a license on patents related to the center’s research. According to the university, it was the largest such licensing deal in ODU history.

Years ago, the center helped start an international bioelectrics consortium along with researchers from as far as Japan and Germany.

“It’s the top research institution for that area of research,” said Dr. Martin Gundersen, who directs the Pulsed Power Research Group at the University of Southern California and was colleagues with Karl Schoenbach, the founding director of ODU’s bioelectrics center.

“It spawned a worldwide effort,” Gundersen said.

The ODU team says cancer is a complex disease to treat. There is no real silver bullet for treatment. But the pulse research is a “big step forward,” Beebe said.

On a recent Tuesday, one of Beebe’s recruits, Brittney Ruedlinger, a center research assistant and graduate student at ODU, was in the lab looking through a microscope at a dish full of cells.

“I always thought this was the cool place to be,” said Ruedlinger, 32.

Cancer tricks the body into supporting it, Beebe said. So part of their work today involves learning more about how the pulse kills cells.

“We want to kill the cells in a way the immune system will see them,” he said, as Ruedlinger moved the contents of her dish – mitochondria, the “powerhouse” of the cell, responsible for creating energy – into small tubes.

The center will then pulse those same cells using a pulse generator machine. They want to see the effects.

Ruedlinger hopes her work will pay back in generations after her. So as the center await clinical trials and crosses its fingers for federal approval, Ruedlinger has her head down in the lab most days.

“I’m here because I’m looking at what the future holds,” she said.