Driven to research
Photos by Evan Krape and courtesy of Atif Bacchus July 12, 2024
Undergraduate researcher Atif Bacchus works to find new screening methods and therapies for breast cancer
When University of Delaware junior Atif Bacchus was very young, his mother would sometimes abruptly send him and his brother to play in their rooms without explaining why.
As a teenager, he finally learned the reason. His mother confided in him that she had been battling rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an autoimmune disease that causes severe joint pain and inflammation, for years. She sent them to their rooms so they wouldn’t be frightened when she had to self-administer injections of her RA medication.
While it was devastating for him to see her in pain as her disease progressed, the experience would ultimately shape his future. Bacchus is now contributing to groundbreaking cancer research and pursuing a career in medicine, determined to help others who are suffering.
“It fueled my passion to choose a career in the medical field — to make a positive impact on people's lives, starting at home,” he said.
Bacchus, an honors biological sciences major in UD’s Medical Scholars Program, is using cutting-edge gene-editing CRISPR technology in the search for new screening tools and therapies for breast cancer. A Delaware INBRE Summer Student Research fellow, he is working with faculty mentor Jennifer Sims-Mourtada, director of Translational Breast Cancer Research at the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center and Research Institute and an affiliated associate professor in UD’s Department of Medical and Molecular Sciences.
Sims-Mourtada’s team aims to reduce racial disparities in breast cancer mortality rates from triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive subtype of the disease that does not respond to many standard treatment therapies. Black women are more likely to be diagnosed with it at a younger age and at later stages, leading to significantly higher mortality rates. Delaware has the highest incidence of TNBC in the nation.
Using CRISPR, they are working to “knock out” a specific gene that is linked to redox stress — an imbalance between the action of DNA-damaging particles and the body’s ability to neutralize them — and radiation resistance in TNBC. He is also examining tumor cells to help identify biomarkers linked to inflammatory properties in breast cancer, which could lead to more effective screening, earlier detection and better disease outcomes.
The team is working with a comprehensive and complex biomarker called pan-immune inflammation value (PIV), which could make the process of identifying certain risk factors for breast cancer as simple as taking a blood test. PIV's effectiveness as a diagnostic measure has been studied in other cancers, but not breast cancer, Bacchus said. PIV is promising because it can be assessed through a complete blood cell count test, unlike more time-consuming and invasive procedures such biopsies.
“We analyze the blood test to find different biomarkers, or different concentrations of these markers, that are related to the immune system and inflammation — such as lymphocytes, which are a type of white blood cell with anti-tumor immune properties,” Bacchus said. “We can then categorize the patient as ‘high PIV’ or ‘low PIV.’”
A patient’s PIV classification will reflect the overall state of her immune system and level of inflammation. The goal is to eventually link PIV testing with other diagnostic measures, such as mammograms, Bacchus said.
Once researchers understand more about its relationship to cancer variability, it could potentially serve as an indicator for aggressive forms of breast cancer, allowing for timely, possibly patient-tailored treatment. Bacchus is currently working with Sims-Mourtada to publish the results of their PIV research later this summer.
Bacchus’ work this summer builds on research he did in summer 2023 with Scott Siegel, director of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at Helen F. Graham Cancer Center and Sims-Mourtada’s close collaborator in the field of disparity research.
With Siegel, Bacchus focused on advanced-stage patients living in a breast-cancer hotspot — identified from previous research conducted by Siegel’s team — located in the city of Wilmington. Compiling and condensing the data from hundreds of healthcare records, he built a comprehensive database of the patients’ cancer risk factors, such as a family history of the disease or alcohol use, and their co-existing health conditions, such as diabetes or hypertension.
Eventually, Sims-Mourtada and Siegel’s team will use this database to identify gaps in preventative care for women in Delaware and, when combined with other screening tools, it will help them assess a woman's overall risk of developing breast cancer.
“I just fell in love with the research,” he said. “I realized that this is a major issue, and I had helped to make a difference.”
While he found research fascinating and knew it would help patients in the long run, Bacchus said, he still felt something was lacking. He longed for the one-on-one interaction of daily medical practice.
“My aspirations in medicine were tugging me in conflicting directions, and it left me feeling unfulfilled,” he said. “It was during this time that I discovered the Medical Scholars Program.”
Available to UD students who are planning to become doctors, the Medical Scholars Program gave him the chance to earn early acceptance to the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University and allowed him to participate in job-shadowing experiences at Christiana Hospital, providing the direct patient contact he had been missing.
Bacchus said these showed him life in all its phases — from labor and delivery to trauma rooms, emergency surgeries to post-death procedures. He credits this for helping him recognize the depth of patients’ struggles, just as seeing his mother’s suffering had inspired him to pursue medicine all those years ago.
“I gained a greater appreciation for life,” he said. “It ultimately cemented my desire to make a difference both as a doctor and through research.”
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