Cancer

High-Tech Tattoos May Help Prevent Skin Cancer

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 06:00:00 +0000

High-Tech Tattoos May Help Prevent Skin Cancer Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/05/2021 - 00:00

Dan Strain

Carson Bruns was 19 years old when he got his first ink.

During a study abroad program in 2005, he spent a month in monasteries nestled in the mountains of Japan. When he returned home, Bruns got a tattoo of the Japanese character for “mountain.”

“It was a profoundly meaningful experience for me, and I wanted something to mark that moment in my life,” said Bruns, assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering and ��ƷSM��ӰƬ’s ATLAS Institute, an interdisciplinary institute for radical creativity and invention.

He isn’t alone. Archaeologists and scientists have evidence of tattoos on six continents, some dating back millenia. And for the growing numbers of Americans with body art, tattoos can be deeply personal.

But Bruns, a chemist by training, has wondered if tattoos could do more.

Over the last four years, the scientist and his colleagues at ��ƷSM��ӰƬ have worked to bring body art into the realm of science fiction. This spring, the team started a collaboration with the CU Anschutz Medical Campus to test out a tattoo ink that’s completely invisible — and could lower your risk of skin cancer, much like a “permanent sunscreen,” he said. At the same time, he and doctoral student Jesse Butterfield (MMechEngr’17; PhD’23) have launched a company called Chromopraxis that will soon sell the first commercially available, color-changing tattoo inks.

To show off his newest tattoo, inked in July, Bruns takes out an ultraviolet flashlight and shines it on his wrist. In a few seconds, a series of blue numbers slowly appear — 88:88, like the display on a digital clock.

Bruns explained that this particular ink is activated by ultraviolet light. In most settings, these inks are invisible, but can appear in a wide range of colors when exposed to direct sunlight.

“The idea is that you can use light to reprogram it to say any four numbers or letters that you want,” Bruns said.

And while these creations might sound like the stuff of cyberpunk fiction, Butterfield explained that these inks are surprisingly low-tech. The team first suspends bits of polymer material into a special liquid mixture, which causes them to glob together and form tiny spheres. Researchers then embed the spheres with dyes.

“It’s like a salad dressing where you have to shake it up to mix the oil and vinegar together,” Butterfield said. “We do the same thing, but with really high-powered equipment.

“It was a profoundly meaningful experience for me, and I wanted something to mark that moment in my life.”

Jars of rainbow-colored inks sit around the lab: milky-white fluids that turn magenta under ultraviolet light and a green that changes to yellow before disappearing again.

However, his team’s latest focus is a tattoo ink that doesn’t have any color at all, but can, theoretically, shield human skin from incoming rays of sunlight. They nicknamed the product Invelanin, a mash-up of “invisible” and “melanin.”

“The idea is that you’d get this invisible tattoo once on your head and neck, where 80% of skin cancers occur. Then, you might have a lower cancer risk for years or decades,” Bruns said.

The researchers have since procured a $150,000 grant from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade to further develop Invelanin. They’ve also partnered with Dr. Rajesh Agarwal at CU Anschutz to test the ink’s safety and how effective it is at lowering skin cancer risk.

Whatever the results, Invelanin won’t be on the market for years. But Bruns and Butterfield are hoping to bring their color-changing inks to tattoo parlors across the country soon — connecting to a community that, like them, wants to reimagine the tattoos of the future.

And, for Bruns, it all began with that one Japanese character: “This project came from a special place in my heart I have for body art.”

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Illustration by Matt Twombly

CU’s Carson Bruns is testing a tattoo ink that’s completely invisible, and could lower the risk of skin cancer.

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Flying in the Face of Cancer

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Flying in the Face of Cancer Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/01/2012 - 00:00

Clay Evans

Finding chemo drugs that can kill cancer cells after radiation fuels professor Tin Tin Su’s cutting-edge research at CU-Boulder.

Cancer is the country’s No. 2 killer, following heart disease. Professor Tin Tin Su is working to develop powerful new tools in the fight against the deadly disease.

The next time you see a telltale cloud of fruit flies indicating decaying produce on your kitchen counter, you might want to say a little thank you before hauling the rotten stuff out to the compost.

Why? Because of the humble genus Drosophila, CU-Boulder professor Tin Tin Su of molecular, cellular and developmental biology is primed to develop powerful new tools in the fight against cancer.

The little flies are part of Su’s screening process to identify drugs that will work in combination with radiation to treat cancer. Because radiation doesn’t just kill cancer cells, it can be fatal to surrounding healthy tissue. So doctors must try to target dosages carefully.

But that raises the possibility that some cancerous cells are left behind.

“If there is any left behind, and you give it time to divide and multiply, the tumor will grow back,” says Su, co-founder of the company SuviCa, which completed an exclusive license agreement with CU for a drug screening technology to identify novel therapies for cancer.

Finding chemo drugs that can kill post-radiation cancer cells is critical and fuels Su’s research. Cancer is the country’s second leading killer, following heart disease. This year the American Cancer Society estimates that 1,638,910 people will be newly diagnosed with cancer and 577,190 people will die from it.

But how, exactly, does the little fruit fly figure into all this? Simply put, cancer occurs when cells are growing out of control. To stop out-of-control cells in their tracks, doctors must remove them via surgery or kill them with radiation or chemotherapy.

As it turns out, combinations of radiation and chemotherapy can be more effective than either treatment on its own. But not all combinations work. The success of the combination is based on synergy between agents, but the challenge is finding combinations that work, Su says.

“What radiation does is damage the DNA inside our cells,” she explains. “When a cell has damaged DNA, it tries to fix itself. A lot of times, depending on the dose of radiation, the cell can’t fix itself and will die.”

In terms of cancer treatment, that’s good. But there always remains the danger that some cancerous cells are left behind.

Enter Drosophila, which acts as a sort of stand-in for a cancerous tumor. Researchers zap targeted “packets” of cells in the fly larva with radiation. Then different agents are applied to see if they will control the growth of cells after exposure to radiation.

Drosophila fly

Now, here’s the counterintuitive bit: in this research you actually want the “patient” — the fly larva, a tumor analog — to die. If the larva lives to metamorphose into an adult fly, the “tumor” has survived, and the treatment hasn’t been effective.

“If it develops into a normal adult, that means it’s been able to compensate or replace the cells killed by radiation,” Su says.

With help from CU’s Technology Transfer Office, patent rights were applied for in 2006 and awarded in 2010. Su says the Drosophila screening process is several times more effective than any current system. Today’s drug screening systems use cells grown outside the body, typically in a plastic dish. The limitation of these systems is that you lose the context the cells are in when they are in an animal.

The advantage of the Drosophila system is the cells are in their natural environment. As a result the drug candidates Su finds have potential for more success on a tumor growing in the intact body of a patient.

“And fruit flies are cheap and easy to grow,” she says. “The whole experiment can be done in two weeks.”

The technology shows tremendous promise in sniffing out new cancer drugs, says Tom Smerdon of the Technology Transfer Office, who began working with Su about five years ago and helped SuviCa and CU work out a licensing agreement. Research done by faculty is the intellectual property of the university and so must be licensed for commercial use.

“As a drug discovery and a screening platform, this technology potentially could lead to the identification and development of drugs primarily effective for the treatment of cancer,” Smerdon says.

Su is chief science officer for SuviCa, which she started with CU graduate Scott Norviel (Econ’10) to help bring the technology to market. The company already has obtained two major grants, one from the state of Colorado’s business development program and the other from the Internal Revenue Service small-business program, as well as funding from private sources.

Su says her experience with starting the company has further convinced her CU is a natural environment for entrepreneurship in the biotech realm.

“There are many resources here, a lot of talent . . .” says Su who started her independent research career at CU-Boulder 13 years ago. “This is a top-notch place. We need to tap into all that talent and start making Colorado the go-to place for biotech.”

She hopes her work will have a lasting impact on cancer research.

“The hope of most of us [scientists] is that whatever we find will be useful either within our lifetimes or for another generation of scientists,” she says. “We all want to be useful in understanding human disease and erase suffering in some way. It’s very satisfying to come as close to that as possible during my scientific lifetime.”

Roughly 5 to 10 percent of inventions meet the criteria necessary to become start-up companies. At CU this translates to five to 10 startups per year depending on the number of invention disclosures the Technology Transfer Office receives in any given year.

Photo (top) courtesy Glenn Asakawa

Top things to know about CU-Boulder startups

A few successful startup companies

Myogen, a Colorado-based biopharmaceutical company, was acquired by Gilead Sciences in 2006 for $2.5 billion.
Dharmacon, which markets products and customized RNA-synthesis services to research laboratories, was acquired for $80 million in 2004 by Fisher Scientific. Fisher merged with Thermo Electron in 2006, and the company is called Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Nobel prize winner Thomas Cech, CU-Boulder chemistry professor, discovered RNA could behave like an enzyme. His ribozyme discoveries were the basis for forming Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals Inc., later named Sirnal Therapeutics, which was acquired by Merck in 2006 for $1.1 billion.

Why encourage startups?

Startups translate academic inventions into commercial goods and services
A successful track record helps recruit and retain high-quality faculty.
Startups are an engine for local economic development and job creation

Source: CU Technology Transfer Office

Cancer is the country’s No. 2 killer, following heart disease. Professor Tin Tin Su is working to develop powerful new tools in the fight against the deadly disease.

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