Shiladitya Sengupta was on the subway in Boston when he saw someone selling balloons that contained smaller balloons inside them. If you've seen one of those things, you'll know what a hideous racket they can make when some young swine with a sharp object gets close to them. But instead of exhibiting the normal adult human reflex of covering up both ears in anticipation, Shiladitya dug into his roots and exhibited the normal desi reflex: He started thinking about work.
Sengupta, luckily for us, was a postdoctoral associate at one of the biology labs at MIT, and was part of a team that was working on a treatment for cancer. The double balloon thing eventually led his team to develop something called nanocell cancer treatment.
The January edition of India New England carries a profile of Sengupta, who was one of the five desis on TR35 - the list of top young technology innovators last year.
Sengupta, an assistant professor for Harvard Medical School and MIT, came to the United States in 2001 after receiving his doctorate in pharmacology from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is originally from New Delhi, India, and he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Sengupta now lives in Waltham, Mass., with his wife, Shivani, who also teaches at MIT.
What Sengupta developed for cancer treatment stems from the idea of a balloon within a balloon. One balloon carries a drug to shut down the blood supply, and the second, smaller balloon carries a drug to kill the cancer. [Link]
Conventional treatments for cancer have used chemotherapy, and the biggest problem with chemotherapy is its egalitarian nature: it destroys without discriminating between healthy and cancerous cells. One of the most promising alternatives to chemotherapy is antiangiogenesis therapy:
Angiogenesis is the creation of tiny new blood vessels. The term comes from the 2 Greek words: angio, meaning "blood vessel," and genesis, meaning "beginning."
Normally, this is a healthy process. As the human body grows and develops, it needs to create new blood vessels to reach all of its cells. As adults, we don't have quite the same need for making new blood vessels, but there are times when angiogenesis is still important. New blood vessels, for instance, help the body heal wounds and repair damaged body tissues.
But in a person with cancer, this same process creates new, very small blood vessels that provide a tumor with its own blood supply and allow it to grow.
Antiangiogenesis treatment is the use of drugs or other substances to stop tumors from developing new blood vessels. Without a blood supply, tumors can't grow much larger than the eye of a needle [Link]
But the problem with this is that it could sometimes deprive tumors of oxygen as well and encourage tumors to develop more blood vessels because they want their oxygen. A possible solution would be to combine chemotherapy and antiangiogenesis drugs, and Sengupta's idea was to create a dual layer balloon, the outer one carrying anti-angiogenesis drugs and the inner one chemotherapy drugs. The nanocells only penetrate tumors, because they are too large for normal blood vessels. Once the cell is inside, it explodes (there is no mention of noise levels when this happens) and the chemotherapy drug then kills the tumor. After all this effort that was presumably aimed at saving mankind, Sengupta and his professor then used it to make mice live longer. Now, why did they think more rats would help mankind? Whatever.
The team tested this model in mice. The double-loaded nanocell shrank the tumor, stopped angiogenesis and avoided systemic toxicity much better than other treatment and delivery variations.
Eighty percent of the nanocell mice survived beyond 65 days, while mice treated with the best current therapy survived 30 days. Untreated animals died at 20. [Link]
And here is my obligatory bad metaphor for the post. Whereas the nanocells pack cancer cures, Sengupta packs a deadly dose of winning humility.
"It's a very simple thing -- I mean, nothing great, but it has implications," he says.
"It's very logical, but nobody thought of this before. I mean, in fact I was thinking about this, like 'Why didn't it strike me before, or strike anybody else before?'" Sengupta says. [Link]
It is a widely held belief that - with all the advances being made in cancer care - in the next decade or so, scientists would be able to find a "cure" for cancer - a combination of drugs that can turn most types of cancer into chronic illnesses that can inconvenience but not kill. And when that happens, I'm sure some of the drugs will be double bagged, Shiladitya style.
PS: By the way, just to show off how well I researched this post, previous winners of the TR35 award include Jonathan Abrams, the founder of Friendster and the ubiquitous Google guys. You are most welcome.
