Bioelectricity and Cancer Research

I really wanted to work on cancer, and I really wanted to work on this, um,

on this

idea that, uh, there's a bioelectric component to it.

And, and the, and the way you can, you can think about it is simply that w-

w-

not why is there cancer, but why is there anything but cancer?

So, so why do cells ever cooperate instead of

being amoebas?

Why do they ever cooperate? And so we know that the bioelectric

signaling is the

kind of, um, cognitive glue that, that binds them together towards these

large scale construction projects, maintaining organs and things like that.

And so, um, yeah, so we wanted to study

that bioelectrically.

And so I had, I had two students, uh, Brooke Tchernit and, uh, Maria

Lobikin, who, uh, undertook that, and we were able to

show that using this bioelectrical imaging, you can tell which

cells were going to convert ahead of time.

You could also convince perfectly normal cells to become

metastatic melanoma just by giving them inappropriate bioelectric cues about

their environment. So you can f-- you can co-- no, no genetic damage, no

carcinogens, no, you know, oncogenes, but, but just the wrong bioelectric

information, and they become, uh, like metastatic melanoma.

Um, and, and best of all, they were able to show

that you can actually reverse,

not re-re-reverse, um, a carcinogenic stimuli, for example, human

oncogenes, by appropriate bioelectric connections to

their neighbors.

So we had a whole set of, uh, we had a whole set of papers, um,

showing how

to, uh, how to control s- cells bioelectrically.

And, uh, uh, Juanita Matthews in my lab now is, uh,

trying to take,

um, take all those strategies into human, into human cancer