Widower gets grant to study cancer that killed wife
An Edmonton man researching a treatment for a rare ovarian cancer that killed his wife has received a $50,000 grant to continue his work.
Powel Crosley says he never imagined he’d be a cancer researcher in a university laboratory, and certainly not at the age of 60. But after he lost his wife of 19 years, Sladjana, to granulosa cell tumour (GCT) in 2009, he chose to continue her legacy.
Crosley, who holds a master’s degree in geography, says it was his wife, a chemical engineer, who was the scientist of the family.
In 2004, frustrated with the lack of information on GCT, Sladjana founded the Granulosa Cell Tumour Research Foundation, which Crosley decided to take over after her 12-year battle with the disease ended at 58.
“When she died in 2009, I was kind of stuck for what to do and decided to carry on the foundation that she had started. As part of that, I thought I should probably know more about cancer.”
In 2010, he enrolled as a student at the University of Alberta. For the past two years, Crosley has been working in the University of Alberta’s oncology lab, examining the reaction of cancerous granulosa cells to two types of drugs that target infected cells.
Just two weeks ago, he was awarded $50,000 from the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute to help him carry on his research to find effective treatment options.
GCT is generally easy to treat at first, says Crosley. Sladjana was diagnosed with granulosa cell tumour in 1996 and was treated in Tennessee where the couple lived at the time. Crosley says doctors believed she was cancer free.
“She had surgery, the doctors told her that was it, there was almost never a recurrence of GCT, and we moved to New Zealand thinking everything was fine.”
Three years later, Sladjana’s cancer returned, which is when the chances of survival significantly decrease, Crosley says.
“If it recurs, 80 percent of the women will die of the disease.”
Only about five per cent of all ovarian cancers are GCT, says Crosley, which makes it particularly challenging to treat if it does return.
Mary Hitt, a professor at the University of Alberta who invited Crosley into her lab, says breakthroughs with more common forms of ovarian cancer may not help GCT patients.
“Everything you find out about the other type of cancer, that may not apply (to GCT),” Hitt says.
The majority of ovarian cancers start in epithelial cells, which make up the lining of cavities in the body, but granulosa is a type of stromal cell, a connective tissue cell.
Crosley’s research is still in the preliminary stages.
He’s studying the response of two immortal cell lines — cancerous cells that were harvested from patients and continue to multiply outside the body — but he hopes to build up his research to test live tissue samples of GCT patients.
The challenge comes in finding patients with the illness because it is so rare, but Crosley says he is hopeful that with enough persistence he’ll be able to take his research to the next level.
“The best possible outcome would be that these two drugs can work together to effectively control recurrent granulosa cell tumour and do it without being toxic to the patient.”