How NASA’s Search for Aliens Helped Detect Breast Cancer

Dr. Susan Love was exasperated.

Love—the chief visionary officer of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, which is focused on breast cancer research—couldn’t figure out how to effectively study breast ducts, where breast cancer often begins. The ducts have a low biomass, taking up a barely readable amount of area and volume.“I got kind of frustrated that we didn’t understand very much the anatomy of the breast,” Love told The Daily Beast. “It hasn’t been studied very much. There’s been a study looking at the microbiomes of all the rest of the body, but not the breasts.”

It turned out that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a solution—in its Office of Planetary Protection, whose mission includes “avoiding the biological contamination of environments that may obscure our ability to find life elsewhere—if it exists.” When NASA sends spacecrafts to other planetary bodies and searches for signs of life, the agency follows strict non-contamination protocols to avoid spreading Earthly particles on foreign surfaces and vice versa. That’s important in giving us clear scientific results. It’s also a big ask: The technology needs to be clean and able to analyze microscopic levels of biomass.

That’s where JPL’s techniques like genomic sequencing came in. Love and her researchers needed a way to analyze DNA in the breast’s ductal systems, which contains the glands that produce milk and secrete a substance called nipple aspirate fluid. After analyzing fluids from the breast ductal systems in women who had breast cancer history and women who didn’t, researchers found that the community of microorganisms differed significantly between both groups. The presence of the genus Alistipes in the ductal system correlates with a higher chance of breast cancer, though whether these microbes actually cause breast cancer is not yet known. This was the first-ever study of microorganisms in human breast ductal fluid.

In space, these techniques for detecting life and analyzing DNA are used to look at microdiversity on clean or barren surfaces, such as a planet or a spacecraft. Its coolest attribute is the ability to tell whether potential signs of life—living or dead—are around.

Read more at The Daily Beast