The Bionic Breasts
For a breast cancer survivor who opts for reconstruction, the struggle doesn’t always end with a successful mastectomy: She must cope with a lack of sensation in the reconstructed breast. “Even if it looks beautiful, she can still have the very distressing feeling that the breast does not belong to her body,” says Stacy Lindau, an obstetrician-gynecologist at UChicago Medicine. The partial or total numbness can lead to injuries, such as from a scalding shower, and can fundamentally detract from the human experience: You might not feel a hug or might have a harder time getting aroused. Lindau recalls one upset patient a few years back: “She said to me, ‘The numbness in my breast is interfering with my sexual function. What are you going to do about this?’ ”
Lindau has been working on a solution. She leads the Bionic Breast Project to develop a procedure to restore sensation in such cases. This past May, UChicago doctors performed the first surgical insertion of components from a device designed at Case Western Reserve University. “We implanted these tiny electrodes around the intercostal nerves that were severed at the time of the patient’s mastectomy,” Lindau says. The team ran experiments for months, demonstrating it’s possible to restore sensation in the nerves.
They plan to run similar trials on seven more patients over the next three years, backed by $4 million from the National Institutes of Health — funding that’s still intact, at least for now. “Every element of what we need to do to achieve success is scientifically doable,” says Lindau. “It’s a matter of resources.”
Lungs in a Fridge
Time is of the essence during a lung transplant. The clock starts ticking as soon as the organ is removed from the donor. Typically, the organ would be chilled on ice, surviving only about six hours. But Northwestern Medicine recently started using a new method that buys more time. Stored in a special refrigerator at precisely 50 degrees Fahrenheit, the lungs remain viable for as long as 12 hours — allowing precious additional time between when they are received and transplanted.
It’s just the latest technique Northwestern is deploying to help lung cancer patients. Since 2022, it has also been using a device called XPS, dubbed “lungs in a box,” that allows a procedure known as ex vivo lung perfusion. Here’s how it works: Once a lung is removed from the donor, a special ventilator is used to expand it while it’s outside the body, letting doctors assess and repair the organ before transplanting it.
With tools like this, Northwestern has, since 2021, performed more than 50 double lung transplants for select late-stage cancer patients using a procedure it pioneered. “We’ve developed a homegrown technique,” says Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and director of Northwestern’s Canning Thoracic Institute. Surgeons remove both cancer-ridden lungs at the same time, then, to hinder the cancer from coming back, Bharat says, “we irrigate the central airways and the chest cavity very, very thoroughly, and implant two new lungs in a very precise manner.” The program is meant for patients with no other treatment options. Says Bharat: “They’re at the end of the road, hopeless, and now they’re surviving and doing really well.”
The Universal Cancer Targeter
For decades now, doctors have been using patients’ own blood cells as a weapon to kill cancer in their bodies. T cells, a type of white blood cell, are modified — with chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs — to recognize malignant cells and destroy them. CAR T-cell therapy has been effective against certain kinds of blood cancers. But what if it could attack other cancers, including solid tumors?
A group of researchers at the University of Chicago is working on a revolutionary method for doing that. Until now, doctors have trained T cells to go after particular cancer cells. In UChicago’s method, the modified T cells remain inactive until doctors inject antibody pieces known as Fab fragments. These fragments, which stay in the bloodstream for only about two days, act as a signal, telling the modified T cells what type of cancer cell to attack. Doctors can then repeat the process, changing the target to a different type of cancer cell and thus more effectively destroy tumors. “This would overcome a lot of barriers,” says Ralph Weichselbaum, who chairs the medical school’s Department of Radiation and Cellular Oncology. “Switching the Fab is the easiest thing to do, and [the T cells] could apply to a wide range of cancers.”
This method has shown success against breast and ovarian cancers in animal testing, but Weichselbaum expects it will take several years before it’s available for humans. The UChicago team is also running experiments to integrate the method with radiation therapy. Says Weichselbaum: “It could change the practice of radiation oncology from just a local modality to a systemic modality, where we treat tumors all over the body.”