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>> Senescence is a really interesting process.
It's actually what happens when your cells age and so, you know, unfortunately, as we
get older our cells will senescence.
The interesting thing is that also happens in the early events in cancer.
So we're really trying to understand how cancer cells fuel themselves and how they use these
sort of normal metabolic pathways of using energy to thrive in an environment that they
may not be able to thrive in if they were normal cells.
My name is Katherine Aird and I am interested in ovarian cancer.
I think what we're doing may be relevant in a number of ways for patients.
One of these pathways that I'm really interested in like we mentioned senescence, it's an early
event in cancer.
And so my, sort of, career goal has always been could we prevent cancer from even happening?
Unfortunately, ovarian cancer patients do not respond very well to the therapies that
they use in the clinic and so some of these pathways that we're interested in, we might
be able to find novel targets.
And maybe be able to come up with some inhibitors.
And one of the great things about being here at Penn State Hershey is that the hospital
is right next door.
We may even be able to do a clinical trial and that's something that actually isn't that
long-term.
Maybe in the five to 10 year range.
It wasn't purposeful to arrange an all-female team.
I have a soft spot for women and women in science because we are a minority still.
And I am an advocate for them and a strong supporter of them.
And so I think people who want something like that in their life may be gravitate towards
me in my lab.
I'm hoping to get a diverse group of people, both male and males and females and also different
backgrounds and ethnicities because that is so important for science.
It's actually one of the reasons I got into science is because I love the diversity of
it and diversity of thought makes us all better.
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>> I'm John Elfar.
I'm the Vice Chairman of Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation at the Pennsylvania State
University.
Nerves are what control everything, what you feel and what you can do, what you can move.
They're all under nerve control.
The way your brain gets those signals to your fingers and your toes and your legs is through
nerves.
I'm an orthopedic surgeon so I see traumatized patients.
I see patients who have had their nerves cut by the bullet that's going through the tissue
or a car accident, a bad mangling injury.
These are the kinds of injuries I see but all over the Medical Center you will find
peripheral nerve injuries that are the consequence of care.
There's a lot of very sad patients who have the cancer out but can't move the limb or
who get treated with radiation but can't feel.
4-aminopyridine was a drug we just happened to come across.
It's called 4-AP and we were using it in experiments in the lab for a totally different purpose.
We were trying to use it to tell whether or not our nerve injuries were bad enough.
That's currently impossible, right now, even with all of the greatest tools we have.
All the greatest imaging, we can't tell whether a nervous been cut or not.
The cool thing about 4-AP is it's currently used in humans.
So it's FDA approved.
So we have dosages that are safe in humans, for example.
When we use a small dose of 4-AP, we can take a nerve that looks like it's been cut and
make it function for the short enough time we need to tell that it hasn't been cut.
The second discovery was if we took nerves that have been injured, we could very substantially
increase the rate at which they recover with continuous dosing of this drug.
4-AP has applications so far beyond my own field that I haven't had any problems interesting
surgeons and physicians from other departments in helping we have trials currently planned.
And we're writing grants for trials in neurology, in neurosurgery, in urology, in general surgery
that you wouldn't expect 4-AP but yeah, actually 4-AP has tremendous traction in fields where
nerve injuries are an obligate consequence of care that is really important.
You find other departments that are very interested.
Right now we have an opportunity because we're on this cusp, we have an opportunity to actually
try a treatment as opposed to do the extra stuff required to justify trying the treatment.
We want to go and take the test.
All we want to do is take the actual test.
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>> I couldn't be more happy and more proud of being a member of the Penn State community.
My name is David DeGRAFF and I'm an assistant professor in the departments of pathology,
surgery, and biochemistry and molecular biology.
Getting a grant from the American Cancer Society definitely opened up -- opens up doors for
additional funding.
I think it's a true mark of distinction.
I think that number one, it helps us grow the research program and get the results that
we need and really get the results that are showing us that we're making an impact.
And I think our donors are members of our team because the faith they have put in us
and the mission that we have here at the Penn State College of Medicine is extraordinary
and we couldn't do it without them.
The goal really at the end of this project is to see that if we manipulate the expression
or target the expression of these transcription factors, can we convert one subtype of bladder
cancer into another subtype of bladder cancer that is more responsive to treatment.
One of the things I love about being a researcher is it really gives me an opportunity to be
an explorer.
On an ideal day, I get to see something for the first time that no one else has seen.
The discovery is what keeps us going, helps us deal with all the frustrating times and
that's why we do the job.
So I would also thank the donors for their vision and their belief in us.
They might not be the ones that are able to go into the laboratory to do the experiments
but they know that our ideas are important and they have impact.
And the donors have the vision to see that.
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Thank you.
>> You are helping us --
>> Change lives.
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