This might come as a disappointment to animal hoarders, but well adjusted pet owners will be happy to learn that a local scientist's research could slow pet overpopulation.
William Ja, a Scripps Institute researcher who has a doctorate in chemistry, is working to streamline a cell-level cancer treatment. If he does this, the method could be used to sterilize dogs and cats without surgery -- and even make cancer research easier.
Ja originally got started on this project in 2010,
after receiving a $260,000 grant from the Found Animal Foundation. Since 2008, the same foundation has offered a $25 million prize to
whomever discovers a way to sterilize pets without surgery. Almost
400,000 stray animals are euthanized in the U.S. yearly.
Ja got the Foundation's grant, he says, with this basic pitch: Could a guiding principle of contemporary cancer research be used to spay and neuter animals outside of the
O.R?
Ja's idea: using immunotoxins as sterilants.
Immunotoxins are basically strands of protein, which have been
engineered to have a medicinal molecule attached to them. Think of
immunotoxins as a combination of protein and a chemotherapy chemical, or
a protein attached to a radioactive particle used in cancer treatment.
But these combos are engineered very carefully: The proteins are
attractive only to sick cells, so when the poison or particle gets taken
in by one of these cells, it does not hurt healthy cells.
What Ja wants to know: Could a birth control chemical-protein combo --
modeled after immunotoxins -- work on animals' reproductive cells?
"We thought it would be useful if we could find similar cell targets in
dogs and cats and animals, and see if they would cause sterility," he
says.
Though Ja is not at the point in his research where he would test that
specific hypothesis, he is actively trying to figure out ways to make
immunotoxin production easier.
This would allow scientists to apply these principles to animals at a lower cost.
If Ja comes up with a better way to produce
immunotoxins, it could also lower the cost and difficulty of a lot of cancer
research.
"It's important to say that we haven't discovered anything new," Ja
says. "Everything we've developed is out of pieces of literature that we
did research on. We looked in journals, put a few things together. But
our basic idea is something called a peptide Velcro. It's basically
these two peptides, these two protein domains, that stick together, like
Velcro."
If this approach works, Ja said, his lab wants to share the technology with other researchers.
Brian Brewer, spokesman for the Cancer Research Center, says that
immunotoxins hold great promise for cancer research. Any way of making
it easier to produce them, then, could be watershed.
"They deliver a payload to the cancer cell," he says. "So it's a great hybrid approach."
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