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This is a story that starts with a dog named Ella.
She was a goldendoodle, nothing but bouncy blonde curls. She was 11 years old. And she had cancer. Bad cancer, in her liver.
Veterinarians performed surgery to remove the tumor, but it had what are known as diffuse margins — meaning it had snuck into surrounding healthy tissue. The vets couldn’t get all of it.
Normally what would come next is chemotherapy. But Ella’s person, Valerie Ray of Denver, didn’t want that. Chemotherapy works by being toxic to, well, lots of things, including cancer cells but also healthy cells in the body. That means it potentially comes with a lot of suffering.
“Dogs don’t understand,” Ray said. “Humans understand and have a choice. Dogs don’t. I didn’t want to put her through a lot just for my comfort.”
But, through a research project at Colorado State University, Ray had found another option.
There, scientists took a portion of Ella’s tumor and ran it through a machine that killed the cancer cells so they couldn’t reproduce but left their structure unchanged. Then they injected the cells back into Ella.
The idea was something like a personalized cancer vaccine. The re-injected cells gave the immune system a training target. Then, after practicing on the dummies, Ella’s immune system went to work on the real thing, attacking her tumor but leaving the healthy cells alone.
CSU professor Raymond Goodrich and his team followed Ella for nearly three years until she died in 2022 at the age of 14 from congestive heart failure unrelated to the cancer.
“She had no evidence of tumor growth,” Goodrich said.
The treatment, a form of immunotherapy, had taken a terminal diagnosis and given Ella several more good years.
Ray is Goodrich’s sister-in-law, though she didn’t learn about the research until after Ella was diagnosed. She said she often found herself watching Ella anxiously during those final years, worried that the cancer would return. But as time progressed and the cancer didn’t, she became more and more excited about the treatment.
“I was so grateful to have found it,” Ray said.
And now, Goodrich wants to see if it will work in people.
Testing in humans
In a clinical trial starting next month at City of Hope, a national cancer research and treatment organization in California, doctors will test Goodrich’s approach in patients with recurrent ovarian cancer.
They’ll start small, only six patients at first, to make sure that there’s no harm and to test whether patients’ immune systems respond as they expect. But Goodrich hopes to gradually build up over several years to a few dozen patients.
The reason for targeting ovarian cancer is as simple as it is bleak: There are not many treatments available, and when the few that are available fail, patients are out of options.
“Traditionally, it’s been chemotherapy, but in 80% of those patients who get surgery and chemotherapy, it comes back,” said Dr. Mihae Song, gynecologic oncologist at City of Hope. “When it comes back, we know it’s really not curable at that point.”
There have been a number of new cancer therapies developed in recent years that aim to turn the immune system into a cancer-killing strike force. What sets Goodrich’s approach apart, Song said, is that it’s highly personalized, using a patient’s own tumor to train their immune system. By leaving the structure of the entire cell intact — including all the little identifying proteins known as neoantigens — it gives the immune system a much more complete picture of the enemy than other immunotherapies.
“This trial offers an opportunity for patients really to have a targeted therapy against their own tumor,” Song said.
If all goes well in the trials, Goodrich wants to take the therapy to the broader market and test it on additional types of solid-organ tumors.
“You would always hope, but I think it’s too optimistic to think that it completely cures it,” he said. “But it’s maybe something that could add years of life, of good-quality life, onto someone’s lifespan who is diagnosed with this, because, again, the prognosis right now is not very good.”
The eureka moment
What makes this story even more remarkable is that Goodrich didn’t start out trying to treat cancer.
His Ph.D. is in chemistry. His earlier work, roughly three decades ago in the private sector, was in trying to purify donated blood of any unwanted germs before it was transfused into a patient. And, at one point in the mid-1990s, he gave up.
“I just became absolutely convinced that it was not going to work,” Goodrich said.
The method he was using caused too many problems — it destroyed things he didn’t want to destroy and caused changes in things he didn’t want to change. Trying to put a positive spin on it, he told his bosses, “We learned what doesn’t work.” But the company had had enough and sold off what it could, leaving Goodrich looking for a job.
He came to Colorado and took a position at what is now Terumo BCT, focused on other projects.
Then, a couple years later, Goodrich was reading a book called “Bioorganic Photochemistry,” by a professor at Purdue University, and stumbled upon a small section talking about the chemistry of vitamin B2 — riboflavin. Goodrich still has the book on the bookshelf in his office at CSU, its dark-blue cover faded with wear, the sticky pagemarkers Goodrich placed in it now bent and dog-eared.
That one small section led Goodrich to a theory about how he could use UV light and riboflavin to purify blood. That theory led to the development of what is now known as the Mirasol Pathogen Reduction Technology system, which uses a machine the size of a large desktop printer. And that machine is now in use around the world to purify blood and prevent transfusion-related infections.
Moving beyond blood
This year, Goodrich received an award from the Association for the Advancement of Blood and Biotherapies for his work making transfusion safer. But by then, he had long since moved on to searching for other things this technology could do.
Goodrich has previously experimented with using the Mirasol machine to make vaccines — similar to his cancer research, the idea is to use inactivated versions of a specific virus to give the immune system something to train against.
“What you want to have for a vaccine is something that looks like the original virus and not able to, itself, cause the disease,” Goodrich said.
When the COVID pandemic hit, Goodrich dropped everything to work toward developing a coronavirus vaccine. That approach ultimately fizzled as other vaccines rolled out faster, but work continues on vaccines for additional viruses including dengue.
Goodrich, along with fellow CSU scientist Dr. Amanda Guth, also began looking at using the technology for cancer immunotherapy. Together, they cofounded a company called PhotonPharma to further develop the research and take it to clinical trials.
Valerie Ray, Ella the goldendoodle’s person, happens to have a background in medical technology. A couple years after Ella’s treatment, Ray joined PhotonPharma as the vice president of operations.
After seeing what the treatment did for Ella, Ray said advancing the research is not just a job for her but a mission.
“Anchoring it in my own personal experience with Ella,” she said, “it would break my heart to see it die on the vine.”
