Meg Roussos / The BulletinJennipher Grudzien, left, vice president and director of special projects, and Chuck McGrath, president of Grace Bio-Labs, talk about a microarray chip result that was read by an ArrayCAM machine at the company in Bend. Grace Bio-Labs is conducting cutting-edge breast cancer research with its microarray chips.

Back in the 1980s, Chuck McGrath came up with an idea for a complex type of microarray chip, a small, flat panel scientific researchers use to get a better idea of what’s causing a patient’s disease and how to treat it.

He came out with his invention, which can compare thousands of antigens or antibodies at once, in the early 1990s, right around the time he moved his company, Grace Bio-Labs, to Bend so he could fulfill another passion: ranching.

“This is a beautiful community and I wanted to combine my lifestyle with my passion for cancer and autoimmune research,” he said.

McGrath, the president and chief scientific officer of Grace Bio-Labs, believes the future of cancer research lies in mapping out the biochemical pathways to come up with a map that shows which interactions came to form that patient’s cancer. The chip his company uses is dotted with tiny antigen or antibody clusters in neat rows . When paired with a patient’s serum, the clear liquid that can be separated from clotted blood, some spots light up and some don’t — but each provides information on the nature of the patient’s disease that allows a doctor to tailor treatment to that specific pathway.

“Instead of throwing the kitchen sink at their cancer and keeping the patient hovering on the brink of death hoping to kill the cancer before you kill the patient, here, it’s more specific; you see this pathway opened because of these analyses we did,” McGrath said. “We treat it with this chemistry, it should shrink that tumor with no side effects to the patient.”

The notion of using biomarkers, specific physical traits that can be used to study the effects or progress of a disease, to personalize cancer treatment to specific patients has held tremendous promise in cancer research in recent years, and Bend’s own Grace Bio-Labs is at the center of breast cancer trials based out of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Lance Liotta, co-founder and co-director of George Mason’s Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine, and Virginia Espina, an assistant professor in the center, were in Bend last week meeting with Grace Bio-Labs leaders and discussing their progress.

Liotta, formerly deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, said he first learned of McGrath as a young NIH researcher. At the time, McGrath had recently discovered a new breast cancer cell line that had proved valuable in researching the disease.

“Now, everyone in the field of breast cancer research uses these cells,” Liotta said in a public presentation last week at Central Oregon Community College. “So he was a real hero to me as a young scientist.”

Liotta’s research involves performing biopsies on cancer that has spread, called metastasis, analyzing a small portion of that biopsy using Grace Bio-Labs’ microarray technology and determining the best treatment based on that analysis. But instead of looking only at genes and their impact on disease, Liotta will incorporate a strategy called proteomics, the large-scale study of proteins. Proteins, Liotta said, are the machinery of the cells, and they can help researchers determine which genes in the cancer cells are causing the problems. Ultimately, Liotta said Grace Bio-Labs will help expand the research across the country.

Genomic analysis of patients’ cancers has helped researchers make great strides in understanding cancers, said Jennipher Grudzien, Grace Bio-Labs’ vice president and director of special projects. The protein profiling that Grace Bio-Labs’ technology allows, however, helps fill in missing pieces that can’t be found by looking at genomics alone.

An unfortunate truth about cancer is that once it’s diagnosed, the tumor has often already metastasized, or grown beyond the original tumor and lodged itself into the bone or liver, Liotta said. There is only a small window of time to catch tumors before they start to invade other areas of the body and treatment becomes less effective, he said.

“In the war on cancer, the battlefield where we’re losing all of our troops almost is cancer metastasis,” Liotta said.

In the realm of personalized treatment, Liotta said it’s important to remember that every tumor is different, and the metastasis is not the same as the primary tumor. Too many treatment regimens are based on the treating the primary tumor, he said. Few doctors see value in performing biopsies on the metastasized tumors, but they are indeed different from the original tumor, Liotta said.

“Metastasis grows in a new ecosystem,” he said. “It interacts in a complete different way than in the primary tumor.”

Grace Bio-Labs, nestled in an industrial area about a mile southwest of downtown, sells millions of dollars’ worth of microarray chips every year to researchers at public and private labs around the world, McGrath said. Some of its customers include the University of California system, Antigen Discovery Inc. in Irvine, California, and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Grudzien said.

The microarray chip gets inserted into a machine called the ArrayCAM, which analyses the patient serum against the markers on the chip. The findings are displayed on a nearby computer. Grace Bio-Labs, which has 50 employees, developed the chip, the machine and the computer software.

After earning his doctorate in molecular biology from the University of California, Berkeley, McGrath worked at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit for years before moving himself, his family and his business to Central Oregon, where he has continued to help create more precise treatments for patients with cancer and autoimmune disorders.

Until researchers can discern which proteins, pathways and susceptibilities are at work, they won’t be able to tailor treatments to specific patients, McGrath said.

“Right now, it’s all just a guessing game,” he said.

— Reporter: 541-383-0304,

tbannow@bendbulletin.com