Wood Hudson Cancer Research Center: a home for the region's best and brightest

Lots of people have big ideas – and the prevention and better treatment of cancer is among the biggest – but very few ever see those ideas realized. Even less see them grow in one of the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression.

But physiologist Dr. Julia Carter, a New England transplant to Northern Kentucky, isn't your average researcher. Carter founded the Wood Hudson Cancer Research Laboratory in 1981 in Cleveland. She moved the research to Northern Kentucky when her husband took a job with St. Elizabeth Medical Center and has been here ever since.

In early March the lab, which houses 700,000 tissue research samples, broke ground on a 3,500-sq. ft. addition. The addition will house those samples, which include tumors from Cincinnati area cancer patients, in a temperature controlled environment.

"We have the kind of tissue bank that you usually find in large research hospitals," Carter told Thrive on a recent tour of the facility. The tiny samples come from St. Elizabeth Medical Lab patients and are encased in wax. Now they're in numbered boxes piled on top of each other in several rooms throughout the lab.

The new addition which Carter is considering, would expand the facility up to 5,890 square feet and will help make the research more efficient and modern.

"By 2010 we hope to have an electronic database of all cancer tissues," Carter said.

The lab has four ongoing goals: development of new technology, upgrading its facilities, building a new addition and implementing the use of informatics in its research. Though the lab is a non-profit organization, Carter's business mind plays a key role in keeping the center in operation.

The Lab
Wood Hudson employs five scientists and is working to make room for five more in the next few years. It is one of only 82 non-profit biomedical research hospitals in the country.

Wood Hudson sits in an old school house in the residential section of Newport, Northern Kentucky on Isabella Street. From the outside it seems unimpressive. Stuffed among houses along the crowded street, it's easy to miss.  But dig a little deeper and you start to see that old school house differently.

The lab and Carter personally own the buildings and residences along the block surrounding the facility.  She moved Wood Hudson there from a smaller space in Covington, Northern Kentucky that she outgrew in the late 1980s. Like the school building, the houses around it needed work. So the homes were rehabbed and are rented out as a source of income to fund the basics of the lab.

"That's how we keep the lights on," Carter says.

She continues, "Ninety-nine percent of expenditures go to cancer research and that's one way we are able to do that." The lab relies on donations and grants to pay for its research, including top notch machinery for the further study of cervical, colon, lung and ovarian cancers. They also have a dedicated network of volunteers who do everything from stuffing envelopes to operating their web site to organizing fundraisers.

The lab itself also remains in a partially rehabbed state. It still very much has some remnants from its school days including the outline of an auditorium in an upstairs meeting space. To help defray costs in its early days, Carter rented out part of the building to a day care. But the work that goes on in those rooms today is anything but old school.

Top research projects according to the center include:

• Investigation into the mechanisms of chemoprevention of breast cancer in a rodent model
• Identification of markers of susceptibility to a second breast cancer in women
• Validation of a new screening method for early detection of human colorectal cancer
• The predictive significance of cell death and cell proliferation in progression of prostate cancer
• The study of the cancer inducing and promoting effects of environmental pollutants, in collaboration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, including drinking water chemicals and by-products of water disinfection, plasticizers, and metabolites of trichloroethylene

This April, Carter and fellow researchers  Drs. James Schaeper, Larry Douglass, and Diana Nardini, will present reports on recent research findings on their ongoing research, including findings related to advanced prostate cancers at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

All this goes toward one overarching goal: working to make research pay off in the real world.

"We're doing translational research, tying together advances. It's basic research from lab to the patient bedside. We're making discoveries that can make an impact on patient care," Carter said.

Commitment to Northern Kentucky
Wood Hudson has a strong commitment to fostering educational opportunities for local students and in attracting and retraining strong cancer researchers in Northern Kentucky.

All the lab's scientists hail from the region and attended area colleges including Northern Kentucky University, Thomas More and University of Cincinnati. Wood Hudson also offers student research grants to students from area colleges. Many students who live in the area but attend colleges far away come to the lab during the summer to get lab experience. In fact, 208 students from 34 different colleges and universities have worked at the lab through internship programs with many of them remaining in Northern Kentucky following their internships, Carter said.

"Our goal is to have the best scientists in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky right here," she says.

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Feoshia Henderson is a former Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky daily news reporter. She now runs her own freelance writing business and blogs about the Cincinnati suburbs at www.cincyburb.blogspot.com.

Photos:
Dr. Julia Carter, Founder Wood Hudson Cancer Research Center
Wood Hudson Cancer Research Samples
Wood Hudson Cancer Research technician in lab
Dr. Julie Carter working

Photography: Amber Kersley