LSU Center Doctor Gets Research Grant

              LSU center doctor gets research grant
Some $126,000 in grants has been
awarded Dr. Michael Wolcott, Ph.D.,
to do cancer research at LSU Medi-cal
Center.
Both grants involve research in
the regulation of cell division and
defining of the defect in tumor or
cancerous cells that prevent those
cells from having a normal pattern
of cell division.
The research goal is to be able to
eliminate the cause of the cell defect
through management.
Wolcott, who is an associate pro-fessor
in the Department of Micro-biology
and Immunology, has re-ceived
a $75,819 grant from the
American Cancer Society and anoth-er
$50,295 grant from the National
Institute of Health's National Cancer
Institute. Both grants are renewable,
the ACS for two years and NIH for
three years.
Wolcott said the research work is
just part of the medical center's
progress as it is developing into a
major cancer treatment facility.
Studies with one grant, Wolcott
said, will involve looking at the sur-face
of the cell and how various
components on the cell surface are
regulated.
The hypothesis on which the re-search
is being done is that two
signals regulate cell division — a
component on the cell and an ex-ternal
signal, Wolcott said.
He compared it to a lock and key.
"They have to occur together. The
key is put into the lock. That stops
cell division," Wolcott said. "One
grant is looking at the lock and one
grant is looking at the key."
Wolcott is studying leukemic cells
that have their origin in the thymus.
He has contributed several medi-cal
papers on the thymus leukemia
antigen structure and control of its
self-surf ace expression. The thymus
leukemia antigen is the protein ex-pressed
on cells in development in
the thymus. It is never seen in any
other part of the body except in the
case of leukemia.
In the research, tumors are being
taken out of individuals and placed in
bottles, where they continue to grow.
The tumors are treated with drugs
and different inhibitors. Once a
scheme is worked out in the culture,
the tumor is transplanted into mice
to see if what researchers learned
about in the bottle will also occur in
the mice, Wolcott said.
"By comparing normal and tumor
cells, we hope to be able to describe
what difference occurs," Wolcott
said. "We hope to be able to con-tribute
to the basic knowledge of the
difference between malignant and
normal cells so we can have a better
data base."
"Treatments have been stop-gap
measures," he said. "Before cancer
can be fully controlled, we have to
understand more fully what con-stitutes
malignancy."