Melanie Coathup, PhD, orthopedics and bone researcher at the University of Central Florida, talks about finding out how to preserve bones from radiation.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in 2023.
Let’s talk about bones.
Coathup: Yeah. Well, there are all kind of bone. So the idea really is, is that I’m really intrigued in developing new ways of boosting bone repair, but when it’s under challenging conditions. So for example, aging, radiotherapy, ionizing radiation mainly for patients undergoing radiotherapy. For example, in space, the extreme environment of microgravity and infection as well. So under those terrible conditions, how do we get that bone repair response to really ramp up and heal that the defect or whatever needs to be healed.
You say four specific things, but those four specific things, especially a couple of them, affect a whole lot of people, millions, hundreds of millions when you get to osteoporosis, right?
Coathup: Yes.
Why did you choose bones?
Coathup: That’s a good question. My memory, I think maybe when I was about 14, I saw a magazine. I remember it was on the floor in the living room back in Wales- North Wales. And my dad was in the chair and there was this magazine, and it had this skeleton, and it had a hip replacement, it had a bone chin replacement, it had a shoulder replacement and all these different metallic parts in the body and I felt that was absolutely amazing. I don’t know how much that drove me because when I left university it was either going to work with eyes or with bone, and I chose bone better, or they chose me for bone.
So, was it back in your teenage years that you felt like you had an inkling for medicine?
Coathup: I think so. Another memory, when I was very young, I must have been, I don’t know, maybe about 10, I decided I wanted to learn the medical encyclopedia, the medical dictionary. And I actually got stuck on the word abdomen, which is the number 1 or 2 word in there. But I wanted to learn it. I was so fascinated. I’ve always had this fascination with the human body and medicine. So yes, it was from a young age.
Do you think your parents always pushed education with you?
Coathup: Yeah. It was very much on the forefront. It was something that was thought that we would do. And I think as well, I was on a school place in the UK and I wanted to get out, I don’t know really I should say that on camera, but I wanted to leave, and the best way to leave was education. And plus I, it’s my mind I like to learn, I like to read. I think it’s who I am naturally.
Do you always hear it was a struggle for women in medicine? What year were you going through med school?
Coathup: No, I didn’t go to med school. I went to a university. That was 1989.
Did you feel like it was a struggle more for a woman in STEM?
Coathup: I don’t recall it being. I studied biochemistry and I then moved to medical cell biology, and it wasn’t necessarily a struggle, not that I experienced.
Did you feel like you were ever the only woman in the room?
Coathup: When we went to orthopedics, yes. So, that was later.
Was that a little strange?
Coathup: It was. I think because even with my dad when we used to visit family, and it was often the case where it was men that taught, and I always just used to sit there. I don’t know if he used to just ignorance or something, but I just used to sit there, and he’d always say, fantastic, you’re a woman and you’re sitting there with the guys. I think it’s something I didn’t think about too much, I just used to do. With orthopedics, I was definitely the only woman in the room a lot of the times, but I never felt like it was something that was against me or held me back in any way.
Sometimes you hear this being a woman and being a minority, do you feel like you had to work and be twice as good?
Coathup: A lot of the time, I think being a woman, you have to prove yourself a little bit more. I find that sometimes I feel like I get asked questions that I think a man wouldn’t, but not often. And it’s not something that really has bothered me that much.
What kind of questions do you think are different ones that, maybe, a woman would ask?
Coathup: I think questions that there’s not a lot of confidence in what you’re doing. So I would get a double take. Are you sure that’s right? And I think, well, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I’m pretty sure that’s right. But it is what it is. It’s sometimes personalities as well. It may not necessarily be because I’m a woman, but sometimes that happens.
Why do you think that girls dropout of science and math, engineering?
Coathup: I’m hopeful that that’s going to change because I think when you look at the amount of women who are studying STEM subjects now, it’s increased. And I do appreciate that there is a gap, certainly in our generation, where not a lot of women choose to do STEM. But I’m hopeful in the future that might change. But I know there’s a lot of questions on why that is and a lot of questions about confidence. And when I’m not sure exactly how to tell them, apart from doing things like this and speaking and encouraging women, that we can do this. I know a lot of women choose jobs that aren’t necessarily STEM, they’re more towards personal care, they’re more towards nursing and admin and that type of thing. Why that is the case, I don’t know. But I’m hopefully in the future that’s I think it’s changing. I think we’ve got more women moving towards this now, and I’m hoping that we’ll see that in the next 10-20 years. We’ll see a bit of a change.
What would you say to those young girls that are, like, 12 and 10?
Coathup: I think I would say you can do it. If confidence is an issue, you can do it. It’s a lot of fun. It’s exciting to discover new things. I think science has been fantastic. I think it’s intriguing, it’s interesting, there’s lots to be done, there’s lots to learn, there’s lots of new medicines and techniques and stuff that needs to be discovered, and we need them to join and help.
Do you want to talk about losing your mom at a young age? She passed away at a very pivotal age, right?
Coathup: She did. She got sick when I was about 14 and she died when I was 15. And she died at just before I was doing my major exams high school and I passed. I didn’t do as well as I thought I would, but I passed. But what was interesting was that I remember when she was ill, she had a blood cancer and I spoke to the doctor and they were saying about all the different things that they were doing. And I went away and actually researched it. And I asked them what about stem cell transplantation? My dad said, don’t be quiet, don’t stop talking. But now actually, for multiple myeloma, they actually do stem cell transplantations. And so I think that really picked up my interest. And then I went to the University of Liverpool. My dad was from Liverpool and we went there for an interview for the university and he told me that all he wanted to do was to go to university at Liverpool. So he was so happy that I went to University of Liverpool, but it was history for me to be there, so it was fantastic.
How important was that for you to have that your dad in your life?
Coathup: He was very important. I actually dedicated my thesis to him, because of that, so he was very important.
Is it important for you to be a role model for, especially, women and minorities?
Melanie Kovap: Again, I think I got and some of it I think is because of my mother dying. I think I have blinders on. I go through life like this a little bit. And I think a lot of things pass me by that I’m not aware of. The reason I say that is because I have a high school student at the moment who is a minority and wants to study stem. And she’s doing really well with the help of my post-doc, Abby. And so I spoke to her parents and they’re saying but what are you doing? She’s just fantastic, she’s enthusiastic and I said I don’t know. I’m not doing anything. I don’t know what I’m doing. And then I surprise my sister in the UK and she says, Mel, it’s so important that young girls see you doing your job. It just has this way of encouraging and helping people to think about what they want to do. And so I think it’s I try, but I think is I’m not always recognizing the importance of it. Could also be Abby, my post-doc that’s doing it. It might not be me.
Can you talk about what you developed in the UK?
Coathup: So, in the UK, my background is really translational medicine. So it’s looking at ways of developing, I guess, using technology but getting it across to patients. And that can be very tough and rightly so. So it’s and rather than looking at pathways and signaling, although we do a little bit of that as well. In the UK, it was very much translational so we were looking at implants, particularly implants for bone cancer patients. And getting- finding ways of getting the bone to attach to a particular region on that implant because it improves fixation. And so we looked at different designs, we looked at different coatings and it’s showing success, which is really great. And then the other thing we looked at was synthetic scaffolds. So when you have a defect, you can pat it in with these synthetic scaffolds and I have been trying to encourage bone to grow. We worked on a new formulation along with a team of us and we developed a new product that’s now on sale with Baxter.
What are the nano-particles that you’re working on here?
Coathup: So, they’re really interesting, and this is where I might go into too much depth. They’re really interesting, so what they are, they’re what we call a nanozyme. There’s lots of different types. They’re rare earth metals, we’re looking at sodium oxide. But there are also other types of metals that are considered nanozymes or other words, an artificial enzyme. So they mimic enzymes in the body. And we were looking at different formulations to try to control the electrons and transfers on the surface, and that controls how they mimic these enzymes. And what we were doing. This now goes to radiotherapy and the damage that ionizing radiation causes to bone, it can be quite significant. And there’s no therapy out there at the moment that can help to protect the bone. So if, for example, someone has breast cancer, they will target the ionizing radiation to the tumor, but the surrounding bone soaks up the rays and it damages the bone.
Does that make it really weak?
Coathup: Yeah, makes it weak, makes it brittle, more likely to fracture. And then in some patients, as well because of the ionizing radiation, the bone can fracture, but then repairing that fracture is a big problem as what can be a big problem, I shouldn’t say. I don’t want to scare anybody. Because we focus on such an area is this huge problem but for patients, it’s sometimes a problem. So the bone can have problems healing afterwards. And in some cases, worst-case scenario, the limb is amputated. So it can be a big problem, not for breast cancer patients but for other patients undergoing radiotherapy. So we were looking at the nano-particles and we found that actually they are- and we’re still trying to work out exactly what mechanisms are happening, but it actually protected the bone, it stopped the bone loss and the bone strength maintained even though they were exposed to harmful levels of radiation, levels similar to what patients undergo under radiotherapy.
And then, you’re also working with astronauts, which also suffer bone loss, right?
Coathup: Yes, so that’s another intriguing thing for me.
So, astronauts, tell me a little bit about how they suffer bone loss.
Coathup: So, for astronauts, the bone loss is actually incredible. It happens very quickly and it happens to much greater extent than anything here on Earth, even for those patients who are bedridden and who aren’t loading their bones, the loss in space is much greater. And I’m intrigued as to, I think, and lots of people as to why that’s the case. Why do they have this extreme bone loss? And I think the jury is still out. One of the things, of course, is unloading. You don’t load your bones, so you’re going to lose your bone. One of them is radiation that’s out in space. And recent studies have shown that if you combine unloading with radiation, you get even more bone loss than either one alone. The one that we’re interested in is looking at fluid movement. Because when we load our bones it forces fluid through the structure. And that movement causes a mechanical stimulus to cells and it’s really important for healthy tissue maintenance. And so when you think about in space and you think about how water is moving, it changes, it floats and does all sorts but we’re thinking what happens in our body. How does it change and how does it change nutrient movement and how does it change waste removal? And this is could that be a driver for this extreme bone loss that we see? So we’re looking at fluid flow.
And then, once you understand that, what can you do about it?
Coathup: Good question. That’s the next, haven’t got there yet. Well, there are- it’s interesting this is way off, but there are, for example, nano-particles and nano-technology that’s being developed that can be responsive to changes in because when you have the fluid flow, it generates a stress on the cell surface. And if you’ve got a particular low flow or a high stress, then it can trigger nano-particles to release a drug potentially. That’s something way off, but so pretend I’m thinking maybe something like that in terms of drug delivery in the future, once we’ve got it figured out a little bit more. The other thing I’ll say for the nano-particles, because the other thing is if the nano-particles are thinking about radiotherapy and also for space as well. If the nano-particles are protecting bone against radiation, the question then is, do they protect the cancer from radiation? And that’s one of the things that we’re looking at now. Technically theoretically with the nano-particles because cancer, tumors, and also the cells tend to be more acidic, it actually with these surface electrons on the nano-particle, it changes their activity. And so when they go into cancer cells in the acid environment, it changes and its actually produce harmful products and so can selectively kill cancer cells whilst protecting them. Theoretically, but we’re looking at that.
END OF INTERVIEW
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