Today: Feb 18, 2025

Shining light on cancer research from Dr. Sarah Crawford

Aaron Berkowitz – General Assignment Reporter

Dr. Sarah Crawford has been a Biology professor at SCSU for the past 20 years and has spent the last 15 of those years dedicating her time to conducting cancer research. Crawford said she has been interested in the world’s problem with cancer because when she began studying it there was so little information out about the disease.

“The research I’ve done that has been getting a lot of attention lately is looking at a bunch of cancer therapeutics,” said Crawford. “I began studying primitive plants because there is not a lot known about their bio-chemistry. Ferns have not been studied in terms of their medicinal properties, particularly their anti-cancer properties. I became interested in looking at that because there are a lot of chemicals that are in ferns that really aren’t in other plants.”

Crawford said the object of her research is to devise new treatments for cancer but she has always had an interest in cancers that respond very poorly to chemotherapy.

“For example, brain tumors, Glioblastoma, also pancreatic cancer where the traditional chemotherapy has had little effect,” said Crawford. “The idea is if you can use these drugs successfully in these very treatment refractory cancers than there may be more of a broad-spectrum application to other cancers that respond better to current treatments.”

Crawford said she hopes to continue to progress towards more advanced stages of testing, including human trials, but needs to be able to prove there are no long term toxic effects.

“Right now we are trying to maximize the effects that we are seeing so we are taking the best combination of drugs to the next step,” said Crawford. “I’m trying to perfect the cocktail first so we can hopefully we can do more advanced studies and collaborations in other laboratories.”

Crawford said she loves the work she is doing right now and finds herself wishing there were more hours in the day.

“What is the reliability of pre-clinical testing?” said Crawford. “That’s a major issue that is on my mind. There have been so many other drugs that have been tested and shown to be successful in the laboratory and in mice, but then when it comes to humans the whole thing falls apart. This research has definitely made me more aware of the limitations of the early testing methods that are done.”

Brielle Hayward and Paulina Mrowiec are primary members of the lab and act as assistants to Crawford’s recent Cancer research.

“We are almost always here,” said Crawford. “When I’m not teaching I am in the lab. When they are not in class they are in the lab. We are constantly working, brainstorming, and going over results to try and figure out where things went wrong. We all work well together and enjoy working in the lab and together so it’s a very pleasant environment.”

Crawford said she hopes to develop a new pre-clinical model and hopes to gain more insight through testing of how patients will respond to treatments because the technology does not exist to accurately predict such information.

“This is a process, we do not have anything that is going to cure cancer now,” said Crawford. “I am very hopeful that we will be able to use the paten successfully, but we don’t want to give anyone false hope. I want people to celebrate the fact that we are doing cancer research and have a lot of students involved, but I don’t want to give a false impression that we have something which we don’t at this point in time.”

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