When George Mason University breast cancer researcher and patent-holder Virginia “Ginny” Espina was in the fifth grade, she had her first glimpse of what cancer research looked like and how it could change lives.
After touring the Roswell Park Cancer Institute on a class field trip and seeing lung cancer-tobacco research in action, Espina and a classmate decided to create their own experiments.
The pair built an apparatus out of a Hot Wheels air pump and tubing. Then they made “cigarettes” out of whatever they could find on Espina’s family farm outside of Buffalo, N.Y. They measured the residue left in the tubes to determine which “cigarette” would be the most harmful to lungs and found cocoa bean mulch would cause the most damage.
The pair never published their results.
“Nobody knew about our experiments because we weren’t supposed to be playing with matches,” Espina joked.
But the result of Espina’s groundbreaking breast cancer research is clear—she now holds a patent that could change how breast cancer is treated and prevented. Espina has worked at George Mason’s Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine for a decade and holds the patent with center co-director Lance Liotta.
Espina’s approach uses chloroquine, a drug commonly given to prevent or treat malaria, to target “ductal carcinoma in situ,” or DCIS, the most common type of pre-invasive breast cancer. DCIS is the main precursor to invasive, metastatic, and lethal, breast cancer.
Growing up on a farm, Espina made the outdoors her laboratory. She found a horse skull and took it to her first grade class’s show and tell. She examined how tendons worked when her father, a chemical engineer, gave her a pheasant’s foot after a hunt. When it was hot in the summer and she and her three brothers wanted to go swimming, they had to build a dam in the creek.
Hands-on experience taught her more than lessons learned in a classroom. Textbooks were brought to life when she interned with a pathologist and assisted in autopsies while earning her medical technology degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She later earned a master’s degree in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University and a doctorate in the same discipline from Mason in 2013.
Challenges are an everyday part of life in the lab. Failures are simply another way to gather information, she tells students.
“I want to find out what didn’t work and how I can make it work,” Espina said. “I love that challenge, that game, that puzzle to solve.”
But for all the challenges, the end game for Espina is clear: “Cancer does kill people but now we have a better chance to survive it.”