How you can help fight breast cancer on your tax return

When you’re doing your taxes, you might notice Line 32.

It gives you an opportunity to donate to the Pennsylvania Breast Cancer Coalition and help fund researchers like Sean Knecht, an assistant teaching professor in Penn State’s College of Engineering.

A few weeks ago, Knecht, and three other researchers, received $50,000 grants from the breast cancer coalition.

Knecht and his team proposed a new supplementary imaging technology to help with early detection of breast cancer in women who have dense breast tissue, an area where mammograms can fall short.

Mammograms are the gold standard imaging method for breast cancer, Knecht said, but “much like any imaging technology, it’s not a silver bullet. It can’t do everything.”

He said 40 percent of women older than 40 have dense breast tissue. On a mammogram, dense tissue and tumors absorb X-rays similarly and so it’s difficult to tell the difference.

There are other technologies that can be used to supplement a mammogram, like an MRI or an ultrasound, he said. But MRIs are incredibly expensive, and if someone has metal in their body from a previous surgery or is claustrophobic, it’s not an option. With ultrasound, a sound wave is pumped into the body. The sound wave travels at the speed of sound in what is approximately water, and when it runs into something where the speed of sound is different, part of it bounces back, which allows that to be measured for depth.

But, Knecht said, if those differences aren’t there, then there’s not a reflection.

So Knecht and his team are working on a supplementary imaging tech called “photoacoustics,” which marries the benefits of optical imaging and ultrasound imaging.

What’s the theory behind the technology?

A short pulse of light, typically from a laser, would be shined into the body, and different things in the body absorb the light in different ways, he said.

“If you know what the absorption spectrum of a certain tissue, or whatever it is, happens to be, then you shoot the light in it, the light is absorbed,” Knecht said. “When the light is absorbed, the tissue heats up and when it heats up, it expands slightly and that creates a sound wave, which goes back out the other way and you measure it with an ultrasound transducer.

“The beauty of this is that the source of the sound wave, you know exactly where it is. It’s localized to whatever that tissue type happened to be. If your transducer knows when you’ve put the light in, then you know how far away that is so you know exactly where it’s located.”

To further enhance that capability, Knecht said he’s working with Professor James Adair, who specializes in bio-compatible nanoparticles.

Knecht said the nanoparticles can be specifically attracted to cancer cells. If the nanoparticles were put into someone, they would accumulate around a tumor. When the light goes in, it would be selectively absorbed by the nanoparticles and create a sound wave so that the researchers would know exactly where the tumor is.

Experts from a variety of disciplines at the university, from clinical oncology to engineering, are part of this research effort.

“Especially, medical problems — they’re so gigantic that they can’t be solved by one specific specialty,” Knecht said.

The goal is to make the tech portable, inexpensive and easy to use, he said.

The grants from the breast cancer coalition are meant to help researchers get their ideas “off the ground” and do the basic lab work they need to get more funding, said Natalie Kopp, coalition communications director.

Thanks to the generosity of taxpayers — the average donation is $8 — and other donors and partners, the coalition has been able to fund more than $3.7 million in research projects over the past 20 years, Kopp said.

“We really encourage Pennsylvania taxpayers to take advantage of this easy way to make a difference to bring us closer to finding a cure for breast cancer now so our daughters won’t have to,” she said.

Knecht and team are doing the developmental work and the initial validation of the imaging tech, and he said hopefully the results of the grant will lead to bigger things.

“Having philanthropic organizations out there that do this sort of thing is really, really important for people like me,” Knecht said.

He expects that by the end of the summer, they’ll have some good preliminary data.

According to Kopp, 37 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every day in Pennsylvania, which is more than 13,000 each year.

“A supplemental screening tool like this could save women’s lives,” she said.

This story was originally published March 20, 2018 at 3:09 PM with the headline "How you can help fight breast cancer on your tax return."