Eureka! A small West Lafayette company may have discovered the cure for a third of all human cancers.

• Author: kaelble, Steve
• Position: Cover Story

Chris Leamon wasn't looking for a cancer cure as he scanned the side panel of his breakfast cereal ... thiamin ... riboflavin ... niacin ... pantothenic acid ... folate. No, the Purdue University graduate student was not a nutrition freak, but because of his lab work under Dr. Philip Low he had vitamins on the brain. As Leamon crunched his cereal, he made a mental note to find out more about folate.

It wasn't the Eureka moment to come, but it may have been the start of something big. Leamon, now a Ph.D., is vice president of a young West Lafayette biotech firm called Endocyte. Low, still a Purdue chemistry professor, is the firm's founder and chief science officer. Working from a small, nondescript building the company leases in the Purdue Research Park, the couple of dozen people at Endocyte are cautiously optimistic that they're onto a cure for as many as a third of all human cancers. And folate, or folic acid, is the key to the technology.

"We weren't intending to solve the problem of cancer," Low admits. In the late 1980s, Low had put grad student Leamon on the task of finding out whether it was possible to piggyback big molecules onto vitamins so that the molecules could hitch a ride into animal cells that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to penetrate.

It was basic scientific curiosity, growing out of an interesting discovery Low had made pertaining to plants. "We found that plant cells were able to take up vitamins and bring in large bulky proteins" attached to the vitamins, Low explains. "We decided we wanted to find out whether a similar process occurred in animals."

So Leamon went to work, using biotin as the vitamin/carrier. He spent months on the problem but got nowhere. Rather than throw in the towel, Leamon decided to see if other vitamins might work better than biotin. His cereal box inspired him to try folate, which worked spectacularly.

OUT-OF-THE-BOX THINKING

How these folate findings evolved into a potential cancer therapy is a prime example of out-of-the-box thinking. Low, Leamon and their colleagues don't come from the ranks of the world's tireless cancer researchers. Curing cancer was far from their minds as they toiled in their labs, and some of their most important discoveries were almost accidental.

Low explains why he was interested in delivering molecules into cells on the backs of vitamins. "Getting things into cells is a difficult process. Drug companies still haven't solved that problem," he says. Cell membranes simply won't let in just anything, especially big, bulky molecules.

Successful pharmaceuticals, therefore, typically must be made of molecules small enough to penetrate the cell membrane. All kinds of advancements might be possible if researchers could more easily squeeze bigger molecules, even genetic material, into cells.

Hitching molecules onto folate turned out to be a...