A Bermudian scientist working in the United States may be well on her way to finding a more effective cure for cancer.

Dr. Paulette Furbert-Harris who is an associate professor of microbiology at Howard University College of Medicine and director of the Core Laboratory National Human Genome Centre at Howard University is on the Island this week, to give a lecture at the Bermuda College on research that might change the face of cancer treatment. Her lecture entitled ‘Eosinophils: An Old Warrior With A New Face - A Potential Anti-Cancer Effectors Cell' will be given tonight at 7.30 p.m. in the North Hall Lecture Theatre as part of the Bermuda College's Corange Science Week.

Although the title of the lecture sounds daunting, Dr. Furbert-Harris is urging everyone interested in finding a cure for cancer, to come out to hear her.

“Often times the research ideas don't necessarily come from the great orators or the great scientists,” she said. “It is usually the technicians plugging away in the lab who happen on an observation. Then we explore. You can sit there, and you may at the end of the talk tell me, ‘maybe you can look at so and so'. This is what I will invite the audience to do.”

She said she hopes to make the material as non-intimidating as possible for the non-scientist.

“I will help people to understand it to the best of my ability,” she said. “The cell is a part of us, part of the body. Let us learn about it. That is my approach. I try to do repetition. I put some slides in the presentation three times so we can help people to remember.”

Dr. Furbert-Harris wants to make everybody a scientist in the effort to find a better cure for cancer.

“I will be talking about Eosinophils, a type of white blood cell that is often overlooked except in allergies and asthma,” Dr. Furbert-Harris said. “I am strongly suggesting that it might have a role in immune response to cancer.”

She said her ideas are radical in the United States, but not so much in Europe.

“There is not a lot of work on it in the United States,” she said. “Maybe it was a radical idea when I started, but I said to myself ‘you are going out there'. I felt strongly about it. We've got some work to do with it. The immune system itself is a powerful system that we have. I call this cell the ‘sleeper cell' because it is often overlooked.”

She first came upon the idea of using white blood cells to attack cancer cells, while researching asthma and allergy treatments.

“This cell causes havoc in asthmatics,” she said. “It is good when it comes to worm infections and what have you, but in the case of asthma it is like the body is hurting itself.”

At first, she was mostly concerned with suppressing the work of the white blood cell in this particular situation. Then it occurred to her that the material that makes up carcinomas is very similar to the lung tissue that is so badly effected by these white blood cells.

Carcinomas are known as the solid cancers and include colon, lung or breast cancer, as opposed to suspension cancers that would be, for example, in the blood.

“A light bulb went off in my head,” she said. “If this cell does this for allergies, the lung cells are made up of the cell type as many of the solid cancers. They are all made up of single cell tissue so it is possible that something that can have such a bad effect on the lungs of asthmatics may do the same thing to cancer. It had not been done before.”

To start her study, Dr. Furbert-Harris went about recruiting asthmatics and some allergic individuals, herself included, who had the special white blood cell.

“We went about looking at the effects of these cells on cancer, in vitro, of course,” she said.

Dr. Furbert-Harris was first inspired to go into cancer research by one of her advisors at Howard University who worked in this field of research.

“When I did my masters at Howard University, my advisor was looking into cancer research,” she said. “She was an immunologist and I thought she was the greatest black woman on the face of the earth. She was very smart and very bright. That is how I got started.”

After she received her degree from Howard University, she went to work in a cancer lab at the National Institute of Health.

“It was cancer, cancer, cancer, but when I came back to Howard University it was to look at asthma,” she said.

The road to finally making a new cancer drug is a difficult one, full of pitfalls mainly caused by a lack of funds.

“It is a long process,” she said. “You have to make sure that the basic science is correct. Then you take it to an animal model system. You test your hypothesis. My research has not yet reached the animal model stage. We are almost there; I was pursuing a grant last year, but it fell through. Some things happened with my colleague, and he was not quite ready to work on the project with me. He is a pharmacologist who works with animals. They have an asthma mouse model.”

The idea would be to implant the tumour cells into the mouse and then either look at how the mouse's own immune system works or to select a model system that would purely be experimental where the immune system of the mouse is absent or is suppressed.

“Like most of us, I have had family members who have had one cancer form or the other,” she said. “The same with asthma.”

Dr. Furbert-Harris is a proud Bermudian, “born and raised” and attended Victor Scott Primary and the Berkeley Institute. She currently lives just outside of Washington D.C.

“I initially left Bermuda to become a nurse,” she said. “I have always been interested in health.”

Later in her studies she almost went to medical school, but decided on a different course.

“I decided I would do a masters degree in cancer research and the immune system,” said Dr. Furbert-Harris. “That is when I grabbed on to this.”

She said once she was on a college campus she was exposed to a whole new environment and the possibilities opened up.

“You need to get students to that level of exposure,” she said. “There are tremendous possibilities, even in research. Research is so vast.”

She hopes her lecture will ultimately inspire, not only students, but also other scientists.

“I want to look within,” she said. “The answers are within healthy people. We have to look at what is going on, what keeps us healthy. I know our immune system is a wonderful system, because for most of our lives, we are healthy. You get a cold, you get an infection and in about a week or two you are back on track. You have no idea what those cells inside your body are doing to bring you back to a state of health and normalcy. That is what intrigues me is health, and what happens in disease.”

She said a person's emotional state of mind in terms of their health is also tremendously important.

“So man thinketh, so he is,” she said. “If you think negative thoughts, if you think depression, it impacts the immune system, absolutely.”

Dr. Furbert-Harris said she is very excited at the possibility of redirecting the energies of Eosinophils to do good instead of harm.

“There is a absolutely a lot of competition in the industry,” she said. “Research funding is getting tighter and tighter.”

She said part of this is because so much energy and research money is being focused on completing the human genome project.

“Everyone is looking at genomics,” she said. “Now everything is about large studies or collaborative studies with this university or that university or universities across the globe. So the money for individual investigation gets smaller and smaller.”

She said the research progresses slowly, not because of the ideas or concepts, but because of the difficulty in finding money and competent staff to help with the research.

Corange Science Week is on at the Bermuda College until February 10. Lynette Woods, chair of the liberal arts division of the Bermuda College said, “The aim of Corange Science week is to keep science alive, because Bermuda is so directed to international business and insurance, that the liberal arts and other professions are being put on the back burner. You still have students doing it, but it is limited. The aim of this week is to enhance science and put it out there on the forefront.”

She said although the Government schools are on break, many students will be coming to master science classes offered during Corange Week.

“The object is to put science out there and let our students know what their career choices are,” she said. “If they are talented in that area then that is the way that they should go.”