Connecting the docs

It’s sort of strange to sit in a professional’s office and not see a computer. Dr. William Hansel’s at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center is a cozy, if smallish, workspace in the newest wing of the facility. His cream-colored Stetson rests on top of a cold, gray filing cabinet. There is a large white board with notes and a neatly kept desk calendar. The bookshelves are stuffed with medical dictionaries and reference indexes—some dating back to the 1960s—and year after year of those annual Who’s Who in America volumes, but no computer in sight.

“I use a computer in the lab, but I don’t want to be looking at one of those all day,” explains the 88-year-old. Instead, he has executive assistant Kathy Huey traffic, type and print all of his e-mail correspondence.

But as Hansel is a Luddite with PCs, the anti-cancer methods developed by his teams at Pennington and the LSU AgCenter are on the verge of sparking the first significant advancement in post-metastasis treatment of cancer cells since 1970.

Hansel’s road to anti-cancer warrior is a unique one. As the son of Maryland dairy farmers, he grew up in the 1920s fascinated by the biological and reproductive processes of bovines. World War II saw Hansel serve in Gen. George Patton’s “Ghost Corps.” In 1945 Patton’s troops penetrated Hitler’s Siegfried Triangle, one of the Nazi dictator’s last and deadliest strongholds. Not before Hansel stepped on a landmine, though, that shot shrapnel across one leg and knee—a knee the octogenarian only recently had replaced.

After the war, Hansel earned a Ph.D. in animal physiology from Cornell University and served on its faculty for 40 years. He and his wife, Milbrey, moved to Baton Rouge when LSU offered him a tenured professorship in 1990.

His anti-cancer breakthrough came in 1996 when Hansel attended a conference in Poland. During a lecture on hormone receptors, he hit on the idea of using these hormones to steer membrane-destroying lytic peptides into the heart of cancer cells.

“Somebody else probably had that idea too,” says the always-humble Hansel. “I never thought I would study cancer, but that conference and my wife’s clinician got me started.”

Milbrey Hansel passed away a year later from the effects of ovarian cancer, one of the reproductive cancers, like breast and prostate cancer, that this new method is most effective against. Results from mice trials have been remarkable. Within weeks, the rodent cancer cells—and only cancer cells, not other rapidly dividing cells such as hair—are almost completely destroyed with just a small dose.

Last month Esperance Pharmaceuticals secured $9 million in funding to continue testing the agent. Those funds will get them through the first phase, Hansel says, at which point “big bucks” will have to come.

“There’s no doubt this method works against metastesis, which is what really kills you,” Hansel says. “But getting FDA approval is going to be a long process.”

Already 88, there is no guarantee Hansel will live to see the treatment approved and benefiting cancer patients. Even if he doesn’t, the ingenuity and contributions of a dairy farmer-turned-bovine physiologist-turned-cancer fighter will not be forgotten.