Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor-News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

In the world’s mis­sion to find a cure for can­cer, a large sec­tion of peo­ple is left out of the equa­tion—coloured peo­ple. Ac­cord­ing to Dr Si­mone Badal, 98 per cent of the prostate can­cer cell lines (used as the first step in the par­a­digm of drug de­vel­op­ment) that are avail­able to re­searchers are Cau­casian. This leaves Caribbean peo­ple as part of a vul­ner­a­ble group.

Fur­ther to that, over 90 per cent of the breast can­cer cell lines are from Cau­casian women. “That is what drove me to say we have to do some­thing to cor­rect this im­bal­ance,” Badal told WE Mag­a­zine.

The Ja­maican can­cer re­searcher who has trans­formed the field through her pi­o­neer­ing de­vel­op­ment of Caribbean can­cer cell lines was award­ed the An­tho­ny N Sab­ga Award, Caribbean Ex­cel­lence in Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy, at the end of Jan­u­ary.

She has spent her ca­reer push­ing the bound­aries of re­search in­to can­cer cell lines in peo­ple of colour. By the num­bers list­ed above, on­ly a tiny frac­tion of cell lines from coloured men and women make it in­to re­search. How­ev­er, can­cer re­search is no cheap task, nor is it an easy one.

She said the cell lines she used in her PhD work were all Cau­casian, but that’s when she de­cid­ed to do some­thing about it.

“Fi­nan­cial­ly, it would have made sense for me to go on to the sec­ond step in drug de­vel­op­ment re­search with these prod­ucts. Aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly, my ca­reer could have been pro­pelled faster and fur­ther, but it was more im­por­tant to me that what­ev­er an­ti­cancer prod­ucts we de­vel­op as a team, first and fore­most, as­sist and pro­vide re­lief treat­ment for our own peo­ple be­fore they pro­vide re­lief for any­body else.”

She set about un­der­stand­ing what the gaps are in re­search, what the in­ci­dents and mor­tal­i­ty rates are for dif­fer­ent can­cers, and what are the pri­ma­ry can­cers of con­cern to us as Caribbean peo­ple. The an­swers kept com­ing out as breast can­cer and prostate can­cer.

Her first goal was to en­sure greater Black rep­re­sen­ta­tion in cell lines—specif­i­cal­ly, Black rep­re­sen­ta­tion from the Caribbean. At that time, Badal had no cell lines from this re­gion. It was not easy. The first cell line took re­searchers over 70 years to de­vel­op.

“It’s even more dif­fi­cult if you are do­ing it from an area like ours where re­sources tend to be less, the in­fra­struc­ture tends to be less, and the chal­lenges are more, but we did it. I got the team to­geth­er, and af­ter five years we de­vel­oped the first cell line from the Caribbean, and since then we’ve been grow­ing our cell line repos­i­to­ry,” Badal re­called.

Now, she is seek­ing to ex­pand those cell lines to oth­er ter­ri­to­ries. She has con­sis­tent­ly reached out to fund­ing agen­cies to help with the work she does.

In Ja­maica, Chase grant­ed her around $JA28 mil­lion dol­lars to sup­port the work she does. She has al­so pre­sent­ed a case to Eu­rope for funds to keep her work go­ing. How­ev­er, the An­tho­ny N Sab­ga Award, Caribbean Ex­cel­lence, will boost her as­pi­ra­tions to con­tin­ue pro­gress­ing in can­cer re­search as it per­tains to peo­ple of colour, par­tic­u­lar­ly those in the Caribbean.

She added, “One of my vi­sions, which I have had for some time now and I’m mak­ing steps to­wards get­ting there, is to con­tribute to a cut­ting-edge an­ti-can­cer fa­cil­i­ty for our re­gion where we can be able to fa­cil­i­tate all the pre-clin­i­cal work on our nat­ur­al and syn­thet­ic prod­ucts, tak­ing them to clin­i­cal tri­als.”

An­oth­er one of Badal’s goals is to give back to her com­mu­ni­ty while play­ing an ac­tive part in pol­i­cy-mak­ing, grow­ing and ex­pand­ing in the sci­ence field, and em­bark­ing on clin­i­cal tri­als.

Badal’s work is in­cred­i­bly tax­ing, fi­nan­cial­ly, phys­i­cal­ly, and men­tal­ly, but she is de­ter­mined to seek out grant fund­ing to push ahead with can­cer re­search that can ul­ti­mate­ly save peo­ple of the Caribbean.