When cancer patients undergo chemotherapy or radiation, healthy cells as well as malignant cells are often destroyed, leaving these individuals vulnerable to infection because of a compromised immune system. Healthy bone marrow and/or stem cells, removed from the patient and frozen prior to treatment, can be reinfused after treatment to allow the normal production of blood cells to resume. Patients need great numbers of these cells to restore their immune systems' function, but stem cells are challenging and expensive to isolate because they make up less than one one-hundredth of 1 percent (less than one in 10,000) of circulating blood cells and are difficult to grow outside of the body (ex vivo).
At least they were until Kraus came along. As part of his studies in an interdisciplinary bioprocess engineering doctoral program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Kraus invented a way to selectively breed tHSCs quickly and effectively in the laboratory by culturing them in a bioreactor he designed.
For his qualifying exam, Morey was asked to develop a proposal for research unrelated to his doctoral research. "I proposed a reactor that would mimic how stem cells grew in bone marrow. It took me about six months and a couple of flashes of light to come up with the concept," he says.
Kraus' advisor, Judith Miller, associate professor of biology and biotechnology, immediately recognized the project's potential. "I encouraged Morey to put his ideas into a proposal," says Miller.
"Doctoral committees review a lot of concepts that are interesting in theory. Morey's was the first in a long time that seemed to have recognizable commercial potential and was also the first qualifying proposal ever, in my experience, to eclipse the originally planned doctoral research."
Kraus put the project aside for a semester then presented it to Mason "Skip" Irving III, vice president of commercial development for the Massachusetts Biotechnology Research Institute. MBRI, an independent, not-for-profit organization, and its affiliated venture capital firm Commonwealth BioVentures Inc., have provided capital, laboratory space, equipment, supplies and management guidance to 20 companies since the two were established in 1984 and are also funding feasibility testing of the bioreactor as well as supporting an applied research and validation program. "We were impressed not only with Morey's invention, which we believe will have a great deal of commercial value, but with his business acuity and tenacity," says Irving, who leads WPI's United Office for Technology Transfer.
Science is Kraus' second career. The Pittsburgh, Pa., native received his undergraduate degree in philosophy and religion from American University, then went off in a completely different direction and started his own construction business, Membrane Roofing Inc., in New Castle, Pa. "During the eight years that I owned that business, my uncle, Irwin Leav, professor of pathology at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton, Mass., kept encouraging me to switch to science," says Kraus. "I took some courses at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa., then decided to take my uncle's advice. I closed the company and enrolled in WPI's master's program in biotechnology in 1988 then switched to the doctoral program."
The journey that began two years ago with a "thought experience" to fulfill a degree requirement led Kraus in September 1994 to a large, first-floor office at MCRI's headquarters on Innovation Drive in Worcester. As founder, president, and treasurer of t.Breeders, Inc., Kraus, who lives with his wife, Tracy, and young son in Worcester, Mass., now puts in 16-hour days refining the "breeder," a two-inch long, tubular, simple and inexpensive continuous-flow bioreactor with which a tHSC pool derived from umbilical cord or peripheral blood can be captured and cloned ex vivo in sufficient numbers to be useful in restoring or supplementing immune function. The company's board is comprised of Irving and Leav, who serve as directors, Steven Singer Esq., an attorney with the Boston law firm of Hale and Dorr, and Jill A. Friberg of Sterling, Mass., t.Breeders' vice president of operations, who is also competing a Ph.D. at WPI. Kraus and Friberg have applied for a patent for the bioreactor, which is capable of growing a single cell type or a wide range of differentiated cell types, including precursors of T-cells, B-cells and red blood cells. Stem cell separation traditionally involves having the patient sit for prolonged periods of time while a centrifuge-like device extracts stem cells from circulating blood via a procedure known as apheresis. With t.Breeders' bioreactor, only small amounts of blood are needed to serve as seeds for "daughter" cells - and that, says Kraus, "significantly reduces patient discomfort and decreases the risk of further compromising their immune defenses which are at risk because we've removed some of their stem cells." The system is also cost-effective. "We believe that the Breeder can ultimately be mass-produced for one-tenth the cost of a separator system."
The company is now at the beginning of its second stage: a six- to nine-month period during which Kraus and his colleagues will focus on engineering improvements to the bioreactor and bioprocess. Additional funding will be sought at the end of this period for a third research and development state dedicated to product development, design and implementation of trials, formation of industrial and research partnerships and negotiation of licensing agreements.
"Our less-expensive, more-reliable and safer source of cells for replacing or supplementing blood-forming and immune system cells will significantly increase the number of patients that receive cellular therapy and most certainly lead to more aggressive and effective treatments for cancer," says Kraus.
"The system that Morey Kraus has developed is particularly attractive, in that no serum or cytokines are utilized," says Peter Quesenberry, director of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center's Cancer Center. "The potential clinical application of expanded cord blood is tremendous. We have begun collaborations with Morey on various biologic aspects of this system."
Kraus sees a distinct parallel between his two seemingly disparate educational interests. "Science and philosophy have a basis in kind. In the study of religion and philosophy, one interprets reality; in science one examines evidence of reality. Both have their principles of uncertainty. And both require some imagination because they are interconnected by our questions about life."
Give feedback: newspeak@wpi.wpi.edu