Researchers in Oregon are slowing down cancer by remotely cooking tumors

Prem Singh dips what looks suspiciously like a Slurpee straw into a bottle of white powder and taps it onto a lab scale.

“We are synthesizing magnetic nanoparticles,” the Oregon State University researcher explained.

Sometimes the most high-tech science requires the most low-tech tools.

“We use the disposable spatulas, which are made from the plastic or other kind of material. If you use metal to weigh the metals, it causes contamination,” he said.

Contamination is something Singh needs to avoid, because the nanoparticles he and his team of Portland researchers have designed to destroy cancer tumors require precision to make. Getting it right could unlock a new treatment that would change the outlook for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffering with endometriosis or ovarian cancer.

Nanoparticles are incredibly tiny atomic structures that can be made from all sorts of materials. On this fall day at a lab at Oregon Health and Science University, Singh’s recipe includes powdered forms of iron and cobalt — both metals.

He’ll heat those raw ingredients at very specific temperatures for very specific periods of time to trigger chemical reactions.

“Atoms start coming together and form nuclei, and then the nucleation process starts. And after that … it grows into a nanoparticle. So this is a bottom-up approach,” he said.

At the end of the process, Singh’s left with a small vial of thick black liquid containing millions upon millions of tiny particles. They’re all the same shape and size and possess valuable physical properties.

For the disease-fighting effects the lab is aiming for, the most important is that they’re magnetic. And if you apply a special kind of magnetic field to the particles, they heat up — hot enough to cook cancer cells.

Tackling tough diseases

Humans have figured out how to treat all kinds of diseases. But countless others have eluded us, many of which are very specific to women and other people with uteruses.

Olena and Oleh Taratula are married scientists who head up the lab developing these magnetic nanoparticles.

“I always wanted to help people, to treat complicated diseases,” said Oleh Taratula of the Oregon State University/Oregon Health & Science University College of Pharmacy. “At the same time, I also wanted to pay attention to diseases, which don’t have a good treatment at this point in time.”

“

Very often ovarian cancer is called a ‘silent killer.’ Patients don’t have any symptoms for a long period of time.”

— Oleh Taratula, OSU/OHSU College of Pharmacy

They found two diseases that fit the bill perfectly — ovarian cancer and endometriosis. Both diseases of women and other people with uteruses that have not traditionally gotten a lot of research attention.

Ovarian cancer is particularly onerous. On the whole, only about half those diagnosed survive five years.

“Very often ovarian cancer is called a ‘silent killer,’” he said. “Patients don’t have any symptoms for a long period of time.”

And by the time there are symptoms, the cancer has often already spread, making the likelihood of survival much lower.

Endometriosis usually doesn’t kill people, but it can cause debilitating pain and infertility. It happens when endometrial cells that normally live on the inside of the uterus grow in lesions on the outside. The condition will affect 10% of women during their lifetimes, and currently there is no cure.

“If you can remove the endometriotic lesions noninvasively, that would remove pain, would improve fertility and just improve the lifestyle of women,” Olena Taratula said.

A promising solution: Magnetic hyperthermia

The therapy the researchers are developing is called magnetic hyperthermia. The idea is to kill the problematic cancer cells or endometriosis lesions by infesting them with nanoparticles and then remotely turning up the heat.

Human cells aren’t built to survive heat above about 108 degrees Fahrenheit.

“It is definite that this cell is going to die,” Singh said.

To the eye, the treatment works kind of like an induction stovetop (though technically, it’s a slightly different mechanism). An induction burner doesn’t get hot; it creates an electromagnetic field that causes the metal in a pot or pan placed near it to heat up.

In a similar way, the lab’s magnetic nanoparticles only get hot when an alternating magnetic field is turned on nearby.

If you know where a tumor is, you can directly inject the particles, turn on a targeted alternating magnetic field outside the body and heat up the cancer cells until they die. There have been clinical trials testing this sort of method for brain tumors and other cancers with mixed results.

But what happens if the cancer has metastasized, like ovarian cancer often does before it is diagnosed? The cancer would be too spread out for a direct injection of particles to work.

This is the problem the Taratula Lab has taken on — and found a promising solution to.

“Our goal was always to develop a magnetic hyperthermia … for deep-seated tumor or metastasis,” Oleh Taratula said. “One of the ways to achieve that [is to] inject them intravenously.”

Once the particles are injected into a vein and traveling through the bloodstream, the scientists take advantage of something ovarian cancer and endometriosis lesions have in common.

“When they grow, they need blood supply… and they have lots of blood vessels,” he said. “But they’re not normal blood vessels, they are leaky blood vessels. So the

nanoparticles escape.”

The nanoparticles will leak out around the problem tissue, where they’re gobbled up by the hungry cells.

But there’s a hitch to this kind of bloodstream delivery method: The total amount of the dose that leaks out is pretty low. Just a tiny fraction of the injected dose ends up in the cancer tumor.

“So you need nanoparticles that have very high heating efficiency, so that a relatively small amount of nanoparticles in cancer tumors can generate enough heat [to kill them],” he said.

Creating nanoparticles that can find their way to the targeted cells through the bloodstream while getting hot enough to kill them has been a huge innovation for the lab.

Rare focus

The Taratula Lab, with its work so heavily focused on women’s health issues, is rare in biomedical research.

That’s because historical disparities in women’s health research persist.

It was only in 1993 that the United States started requiring that women and minorities be included in clinical trials.

“

Five years ago, we were not even dreaming to have nanoparticles with the properties which we have right now. Now it seems very, very close that we can actually try it in clinical trials with humans.”

— Olena Taratula, OSU/OHSU College of Pharmacy

And federal research funding, which is arguably the biggest driver of biomedical science in the U.S., has been a huge issue as well.

When looking at funding related to the relative burden of a disease, conditions that affect primarily women receive far less research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest funder of biomedical research in the world.

Arthur Mirin, a retired mathematician and computer scientist, published a prominent analysis of NIH funding disparities in 2021. His interest in these disparities was piqued after he started digging into funding for a condition called myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which his daughter had been diagnosed with.

He started comparing ME/CFS funding to research funding for other diseases, making a list — best to worst — of funding levels for 74 different conditions.

“I noticed at the bottom of the list there seemed to be a number of diseases that appeared to affect more women” he explained. “It was incredible. In fact I think I was looking [at] five of the bottom six.”

ME/CFS, which affects mostly women, was dead last for funding rate adjusted for disease burden. Endometriosis was in the bottom group as well.

Mirin doesn’t see these disparities improving anytime soon, especially in the current political environment.

The Trump Administration has announced major across-the-board cuts to NIH grant funding for medical research, a move that was temporarily blocked by a federal judge after states, including Oregon and Washington, filed suit.

Whether that funding cut would disproportionately target women’s health-specific research is unclear.

Results and next steps

So far the Taratula Lab’s nanoparticles have been tested in mice — and the results have been exciting.

They’ve been able to reduce ovarian cancer growth by a factor of seven.

And they can totally eradicate endometriosis lesions.

“Five years ago, we were not even dreaming to have nanoparticles with the properties which we have right now,” Olena Taratula said. “Now it seems very, very close that we can actually try it in clinical trials with humans.”

If all goes well, those trials could start within five years.

And while the focus of the lab so far has been endometriosis and ovarian cancer, Olena Taratula is exploring other conditions and ways to apply the new nanotechnology they’re developing.

She has focused on using nanoparticles to diagnose and resolve ectopic pregnancy — a difficult-to-diagnose condition where a fertilized egg implants itself outside of the uterus.

“It’s painful, and it’s dangerous also, because hemorrhage can happen,” she said.

1-2% of all pregnancies are ectopic, and the condition is the leading cause of early-pregnancy maternal deaths.

In addition, in late January, Olena Taratula published research about nanoparticles capable of carrying and precisely delivering drugs to a rare, but deadly cancer called choriocarcinoma, which can develop after failed pregnancies.

“I think what excites me is that we are developing something which could be useful in my lifetime,” she said.

And for the millions of women living with painful and deadly diseases, the new nanotechnology being developed by this Oregon lab provides hope for a healthier future.