[00:00:00.07] – John Knych
Let me start that now. Really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I’ll admit now that my ignorance in your field is very, very high. I had to look up some words when I was looking at reading your bio, but I’ll still try and understand what we’re talking about.
[00:00:21.08] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah. Okay. That’s fine.
[00:00:23.17] – John Knych
I’m pronouncing you right, Dr. Steenbroeche?
[00:00:26.11] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, that’s fine.
[00:00:29.08] – John Knych
I read I know that you’re a postdoctoral researcher, Laboratory of Biochemistry. Can you tell me how you arrived there, your career path?
[00:00:39.11] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, sure. I actually graduated as a Biomedical Scientist at a master degree in Leuven, Belgium here. I was strolling around to find a PhD position. I was really interested in oncology. And I got to know some people working at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine here in Ghent. And it was really… It struck me that they all were also looking into human oncology. So actually what they’re doing here, and that’s the interesting part, and what really interested me to do a PhD, is that they tried to find the bridge between the human oncology and the veterinary oncology. They actually not only work on mice as the normal gold standard model to check out new compounds or new treatments that eventually end up in the human clinic, but they also try to bring those compounds to the veter clinic. Sometimes, for example, but let’s keep it very broad, you have some childhood cancers, for example, like leukemia or lymphomas. These are very difficult to, let’s say, replicate in a mouse model, which is normally done by most scientists. In that case, we try to turn towards more pets that normally have a high incidence of lymphomas, for example.
[00:02:19.20] – Jonas Steenbrugge
They are a spontaneous patient, just like human patient. And dog owners, they are not really reluctant to test new treatments onto those patients, because otherwise, there are no real treatments available for pets. In that case, it’s like a very easy to go path to try to experiment with new compounds without harming the pet, of course. It’s always in consideration about, will it be toxic? We already test the toxicity in a way beforehand. But in looking at From that perspective, these dogs, it can also be cats, for example. They are the ideal model that you can really translate to human clinic.
[00:03:12.12] – John Knych
More ideal than mice.
[00:03:13.21] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, actually. Probably even so, because they have the same environmental exposure. They sometimes even eat the same food as we do. We’re really close to our pets, and that’s what made it interesting. You can actually make a difference not only for the humans, but also for the animals. It’s like a romantic view, maybe, but we call it the one health perspective. It’s actually a really well-known concept nowadays. With the COVID, this actually even came into a bigger picture with COVID coming from animals, keeping animals healthy will also keep humans healthy, that concept. That’s what we try to purchase here or try to, let’s say, contribute to. Coming back to the career path, I got the opportunity to do a PhD on oncology, first of all, with a human point of view, so a human endpoint. I’m specifically focusing on breast cancer because that was the real, let’s say, focus of this research group, Biochemistry Lab. We validate, let’s say, a new mouse model to study breast cancer in humans. It’s a different injection technique. We call it the introductal injection technique. Some labs do it, but it’s not easy to do. It took me a while to learn it.
[00:04:50.20] – John Knych
Why is it not easy to do?
[00:04:53.01] – Jonas Steenbrugge
What’s the difference with the golden standard fat path model, we call it? What you do is actually you inject the tumor cells through the nipple of the memory gland. In that way, the tumor cells will arrive inside the memory duct, like the ducts that also harbor from, let’s say, milk when you give breastfeeding. That’s where a tumor or a tumor, human breast tumor, normally starts. It’s the same in animals. That’s also where it starts. What other or most researchers do is inject the tumor cells just besides the ducts inside the fat tissue. And that’s actually already in a more advanced stage of breast cancer. So what usually happens is that the tumor grows inside the ducts, then it breaks through the ductal barrier inside the fat tissue, and from there on it can spread to other organs. So it’s a more advanced stage when you put it inside the fat tissue than inside the ducts. Most researchers just inject it inside the fat tissue because it’s easy to do. And most of the time they’re also just interested in a growing tumor. That’s it. Not really those early stages. But we try to replicate the whole process from early to a late time point.
[00:06:16.01] – John Knych
And if you can replicate the whole process, that gives you more power to say, We can apply this to human.
[00:06:23.15] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, exactly. Also, these early stage breast cancers are a bit like covered with this model, let’s say. But then again, it’s not easy to do. Most researchers don’t turn to that model. It also has some drawbacks. You need to have a lot of mice to have a good, let’s say, replicates pool. Sometimes some injections don’t work out the way you wanted it just because you had a bad day, for example, can happen. So towards an ethical point of view, it’s not the most ideal because you need to have more mice. But then again, looking at from a human perspective, it’s best to have the best replicate model that you can have for a human breast cancer.
[00:07:13.22] – John Knych
Dr. Stiebrug, how often do these types of studies jump to human applications?
[00:07:23.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge
We always try to have some human perspective here. We have a really great collaboration with our University Hospital, but also outside our University, we have a lot of hospital connections, let’s say. For example, in Brussels, we have a very good collaboration there with the clinic that’s really specialized in breast cancer. What they have there is human breast cancer samples. They also treat the patients there. We get first-hand, most of the time blood from those patients, where we can check new biomarkers that we found in our mice models. Then again, it’s not coming directly to the patient already, but it gives a new perspective. It gives new leads, where we then try to find new fundings to eventually come to clinical trials. It’s very difficult to push towards those clinical trials because you need to have a very strong foundation for that. It takes a lot of years.
[00:08:29.10] – John Knych
So I was going to ask, have you witnessed that process of the jump from mice, cats?
[00:08:36.02] – Jonas Steenbrugge
We are witnessing it right now, more or less, with other kinds of treatments, not the chitin. But for example, we have now a trial, let’s say, towards childhood cancers. So looking into lymphomas, where they try to treat now first dogs as a first model, spontaneous model, if you can call it like that. It’s not really a model, but we call it a model. And that’s the first lead towards going to the patients afterwards in, let’s say, 2-3 years. So that will be in very short time, going towards the first patient. Yeah, maybe going towards the chitin, right?
[00:09:22.17] – John Knych
Yeah, so how did you first hear of chitin and get involved with this substance?
[00:09:27.14] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, so it’s actually We were not directly interested into chitin, but we were interested into the, let’s say, proteins that bind it. So the proteins that bind it, these are the chitinase-like proteins. That’s the first part of the family. And the other part is the chitinases. So it’s the chitinase family, we call it. And you have, on the one hand, enzymatically active members of the family and enzymatic or non-enzymetically active. So what’s the difference is actually the possibility to cleave or to cut the chitin into smaller pieces. So from an evolutionary perspective, what’s happened or what happens is actually that in an infectious disease, for example, you get infected with any bacteria or a fungal disease. These fungis have on their cell wall, so the outer wall of the fungis, these harbor chitin. So the chitin is recognized by our bodies through these enzymes and these non-enzymatically family members. So the chitinases will cut the chitin into smaller pieces, and then the chitinase-like proteins, they recognize these chitin particles, and then they start to stimulate an immune response against this fungai. So you need to look at it from an infectious point of view. That’s the way we started also.
[00:11:06.24] – Jonas Steenbrugge
We got to know these chitinase-like proteins in a kidney situation, so a chronic or an acute kidney disease, first of all in dogs. So that’s where we validated chitinase 3,1 as a really strong member when having an infectious disease that leads to kidney disease. We picked up this protein, and then we thought, maybe we can put it in a broader perspective to other kinds of infectious diseases and maybe into cancer. We looked into literature, and this was actually a field that was booming at the time. People picked up the chitinase-like family as an inflammation-associated protein in different kinds of diseases, not only cancer, infectious diseases, you name it. You can see it from a really broad perspective.
[00:12:05.14] – John Knych
When did you look at the literature? What’s the timeline here?
[00:12:08.01] – Jonas Steenbrugge
When did you- Let’s say mid my PhD. That’s already, I mean- Four years ago? Yeah, five to six years ago.
[00:12:20.16] – John Knych
And you saw that the field was looking at chitinase?
[00:12:24.04] – Jonas Steenbrugge
You had this one big group, from the cancer perspective, you have one big group that really focusing into chitinase 3-like one. That’s a main family member of the chitinase-like proteins. It was the Jack Elias group from Brown University in US. They were the ones that were really going into that topic, specifically cancer-related also. They saw that it was really upregulated when mice got melanoma. They We also found that the source was mainly from macrophages, macrophages inside the melanoma lung metastases. So these macrophages secreted the chitinase 3-like protein in a response to the growing lung tumors or the lung metastases from the melanoma. So this was really interesting to see that there was indeed a clear link towards cancer. So we started to look at that protein in our mouse models for breast cancer, and specifically, triple-negative breast cancer. We’re mostly focusing on those really aggressive ones that’s mostly found in the younger women. What we found is also that the chitinase 3,1 protein was clearly enhancedly expressed when the tumor was growing, and in an advanced stage, you had a higher level than in an early stage. Then we were also looking into, let’s say, the source of this protein.
[00:14:07.17] – Jonas Steenbrugge
In our models, it was not clearly to be macrophages. It was more like towards neutrophils. You have different immune cells that can produce this protein. It’s very ubiquitously expressed. Not only immune cells, but also like fat tissue can produce or even muscle tissue. But in a cancer context, or at least in our models, we found it to be highly expressed by the neutrophils. And neutrophils are really highly present in breast tumors in our models, but also in a normal human breast TMBC, so triple negative breast tumor, when you look at it, you also have a lot of neutrophils there. And even when you give chemo, you get an even enhanced infiltration of neutrophils as a response to the chemo, apart from that. So we also checked the protein and human tissue. We found also a high expression of neutrophils there. So our model is more or less really comparable with the human situation, let’s say. That was the idea about, Okay, how can we maybe, let’s say, manipulate this protein in a way that we can destroy the tumor. What this protein normally does is it heals the tissue. Looking from an infectious point of view, the body starts to produce this chitinase-like protein in a response to the infection, so it wants to heal the body.
[00:15:50.06] – Jonas Steenbrugge
But looking at or when taking that perspective to a cancer context, it actually stimulates the tumor because it In the healing process that it tries to stimulate, it actually stimulates the growth of the tumor. That’s what it does. It stimulates, let’s say, cellular growth. And in an infectious context, that’s okay because you try to heal the wound, right? But in a cancer context, you’re actually stimulating the growth of the tumor even further. So we wanted to tackle that process.
[00:16:25.08] – John Knych
And does this happen across all tumors?
[00:16:29.01] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, this is Really, this is pretty much, let’s say, a straightforward process that you can see in different solid tumors, like colon tumors, for example, lung tumors. It’s the same process. These kinase-like proteins, they stimulate the growth of the tumor, even though they don’t want to do that. It’s an evolutionary process to heal the body. But in a cancer context, the tumor actually hijacks that process to stimulate its growth. And that’s why cancer is such a complex disease. You’re tackling evolutionary processes in a way that this is how nature works, but in a way, you try to prevent that. That’s very difficult. And that’s why cancer remains such a huge burden to treat. So what we try to do is, first of all, look into the literature. How can we maybe, I don’t know, block this protein from doing this healing process in a tumor context? That’s where we found the chitin. So there was one publication from 2012. It was from a group in, if I’m not mistaken, Miami US. It’s a paper from Estefania Librero. She’s now an associate professor, I think, in Yale. Never got to meet her, but I would really like to meet her one day.
[00:18:01.03] – Jonas Steenbrugge
She was the first to use chitin in a mouse model for triple negative breast cancer. And she found that it could, in a way, block the chitinase 3,1 protein. So this is the main family member And that’s where most people are focusing because it also is expressed in humans. So it’s the same protein in humans and mice.
[00:18:22.14] – John Knych
When you say use chitin, do you mean manipulate the chitin that’s already there or artificially inject chitin?
[00:18:29.22] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Because Yeah, this is a thing about… I don’t know how much you know about the chitin, but in a way, chitin itself, it’s easy to isolate. You can find it in shrimp cells or from the exoskeleton from insects. So in a way, you can think about it like eating box, you get already chitin into your bud, or even eating shrimp shells, although we never eat the shell, but it’s inside the shell. But it’s more It’s not that easy to really target the protein with just a normal chitin. You need to have a specific size in order to block it. This is where the libreros paper was really focusing into the size. They found that you need a chitin particle size of about 1-10 micrometers. It’s pretty small in order to have this anti-tumorogenic effect. Once they give these a small chitin particles in a solution, this was just a a PPS solution. That’s the normal physiological fluid that we use. And you inject the mice with that. And that’s in We call it intrapyritonially. So that’s inside the fat tissue of the abdomen. That’s the normal way we inject it. In humans, you can even drink it or inject it through the vein.
[00:19:59.07] – Jonas Steenbrugge
That’s also That’s fine. But in a mouse, it’s easier to inject it into the abdomen for easy uptake. When you do that and you give it like one milligram every three days, that was their treatment schedule, you get a real clear growth reduction of the tumor. That’s what we first wanted to replicate. Can we replicate this growth reduction into our models? We actually found the same thing.
[00:20:28.19] – Speaker 3
So We saw that giving this one milligram, but specifically the one to 10 micrometer size, that’s important.
[00:20:37.06] – Jonas Steenbrugge
You get this same growth reduction and also we’re clearly blocking the kinase quant protein. That’s also inside the paper.
[00:20:48.15] – John Knych
Congratulations on your paper, too. I didn’t say that yet, but it’s inspiring.
[00:20:55.10] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, this was actually main part of my post-hoc.
[00:20:58.16] – Speaker 3
So Yeah, it was a real interesting topic also for human clinicians because now they have an idea about, okay, if we maybe provide this simple natural product to our patients on beforehand as a early treatment, we can maybe prevent tumors from going really big or even metastasizing or even help our immunotherapy that’s now really booming.
[00:21:27.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge
So yeah, That’s what we also aimed for, combine it with immunotherapy, because that’s now becoming more or less the standard of care treatment for these triple-negative breast cancers. But the main problem there is that a lot of these triple-negative breast cancers, they’re resistant to it. When you have a metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, this is more or less a death sentence for these patients. You can just give chemo and maybe in combination with the immunotherapy as a new treatment. But then again, only 10 to 20% of the patients respond to it. We need to get that percentage higher because these are really young women. Most of the time, they only have a very young child. So devastating for those families. So giving this simple natural product can already boost a bit the percentages. Or that’s what at least we find from the mouse studies. So it really works in collaboration with immunotherapy. You get rid of the resistance towards the immunotherapy. That’s what we found in the mouse. And you can also boost the immune system. So instead of healing the wounds, you actually boost the immune system to fight cancer. That’s what chitin does. Now, always take into mind that these mouse models are a real exaggerated situation.
[00:22:58.00] – Jonas Steenbrugge
You never We need to see this immense immune cell burden and tumor growth into a human patient. Most of the times, these patients are already treated with other kinds of treatments on beforehand before they get the immunotherapy and so on. Whether it will work the same way as we see in the mouse and humans, that’s still a big question. But I’m pretty sure that it can work, at least in part, to stimulate the immune with or without immunotherapy. And this is an interesting thing to know because this chitin suspension, as we call it, has actually already been used way earlier than we think. We We had to see the first reports in Japan. So the Japanese government actually stimulated universities there to do research on this chitin suspension because they found that when people drank the suspension, you can even buy it in the pharmacy there. It’s already available on the market for a long time. They found that, specifically, cancer patients in an early stage, you get a way better response to therapy and even a reduction of the growth of the tumor. We’re talking about early ’90s here when they saw this. This field is actually already a long time ongoing and evolving nowadays towards the chitinase-like proteins, because at that time, they didn’t even know what is the target that we are really pinpointing with this chitin.
[00:24:40.21] – Jonas Steenbrugge
It was just, drink the chitin and you will get a better healing towards cancer or even stomach aches, let’s say. It was for all kinds of aches that you felt. And nowadays, there are still companies that sell this chitin suspension in a way for treating the older people in our society against arthritis or arthritis, sorry, muscle aches. You get a better healthiness. It’s a very romantic image to sell the product. In a way, it’s correct, but they don’t really know what they’re selling because they don’t have the molecular insight into that.
[00:25:28.21] – John Knych
Yes. Even a chitin society in Japan that I emailed. Yeah. I and talk to them about their- It’s a huge thing there, right?
[00:25:36.15] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Because they eat a lot of fish, too. And that’s probably where they get the Gaitan from. It’s a really booming business there. I also find an Iceland company that sells it in a pill form. But the main thing there, and this is important to realize, is that there’s a huge difference difference between chitin and the more deacetylated form chitosan. So chitin, that’s the normal sacriot that you find on the cell walls and in the exoskeleton of insects. This is pretty much insoluble, right? So when you tear it down into very small particles, you still get an insoluble flake inside your flask. And that’s why Most of these companies turn it to chitosan. So they do a deacetylation when you look at it from a chemical perspective. And in that way, it turns soluble. So you can get it soluble into a drinkable version. But the main thing there, the problem there, when trying to treat cancer with this chitosan derivative, it doesn’t work the same way as it does with chitosan.
[00:26:57.13] – John Knych
Why not?
[00:26:58.12] – Jonas Steenbrugge
This is still a pretty much debated thing. There are some reports that side by side compared to chitosan with chitosan, and they say that the chitin does do an anti-tumorogenic effect, but the chituzan can even do the opposite. How it does that? No idea. I also didn’t look very much into detail on to that. I just knew, chitosan, that’s not the way to go. Way too much reports that say it doesn’t work. The chiten will have a clear lead there with the librido paper. Let’s just try it. It’s easy to do. The only thing that was difficult is to get it into the very small particle sizes because the chiten doesn’t It doesn’t easily, let’s say, break down. It doesn’t easily break down, so you need to have a very strong sonicate, we call it.
[00:27:55.19] – Speaker 3
It’s like a buzzing system where you break down those long chains of sacrolytes into smaller oligosecrolytes.
[00:28:07.17] – Jonas Steenbrugge
And then you filter the suspension through a very small filtering system that can only let through the particles of up to 10 micrometer. And then the remaining suspension that you get is up to 1 to 10 micrometer-size particles. So that’s how we produce it. And we just buy our chiton from a commercial vendor. It’s Merck. Merck is a commercial vendor, and they have these Kiten Flakes coming from shrimp shells. It’s super easy to buy and also not that expensive. We have 5 grams for, I don’t know, €50. It may look like a lot of money, but then again, it’s like a real, let’s say, aseptic product. So it’s been made into a very aseptic condition, so you can use it in a lab and so on. So bringing it to the patient, it’s going to be pretty easy, in my opinion, because it won’t be that expensive, which, again, is a really big advantage. In my opinion, it’s also not that easy to produce. It’s easy to produce, sorry. If you have this system where you can tear the sacroides down to smaller particle size in a rapid pace, I think that’s easy to do.
[00:29:41.24] – Jonas Steenbrugge
I think companies already have that stuff. And you get a filtration system that allows you to select the smaller particle sizes, you actually more or less have it. But then I checked clinical trials, right? Whether they already did some trials on the chitin. I couldn’t find any. Up until now, I think nobody is really focusing on trials towards breast cancer or cancer with small chitin particle sizes. You can find some trials about chitin on, let’s say, allergies. With respiratory problems, you can have an adverse effect of the chitin. That’s a different… That’s asthma. So it’s a different point of view. Let’s not go into detail about that. But from a cancer perspective, I cannot really find a trial for chitin. That was also really striking to me because it’s so easy, actually, and more or less straightforward to do. What we’re doing here now is we try to not directly go to patients, but we try to bring this treatment to the pets first because they’re, again, easy to make, not that costly, and that’s a huge point in the veterinary clinics. That’s the cost of the products. Don’t get any reimbursement for veterinary medical products like you have in the human setting.
[00:31:13.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge
So owners are more or less reluctant to do any treatment because of the costs. And if you have a very cheap product that still works fine and it’s non-toxic, yeah, they can already help a lot of people, right? And going down to the human clinic won’t be a big leap. That will be just not a walk in the park, but it can go pretty fast forward.
[00:31:39.14] – John Knych
So the next step for you would be to try it with cats and dogs.
[00:31:42.18] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, exactly. Trying to get funding for that is not easy. That’s another thing. We’re trying to find some ways to do it, but yeah, difficult. That’s where we’re more or less a bit stuck now. But budgetary part, not really science part, but it’s also part of the job.
[00:32:06.07] – John Knych
So Jonas, I’ll share with you how I stumbled upon Khaitan, because this may be interesting for you. So I live in Paris, and I met a woman who does research with chitin. I think she has a chemistry background. That’s what you mostly see, people working on chitin or real chemistry-wise. Yes. And I’m curious to know your opinion on this. I looked at some of… She has a video and is working on her PhD. She’s using chitin as a vehicle to transport into tumor drugs. This is the thing. But that’s not what you’ve done. What you’ve done is to take chitin in the tumor, and that prevents the tumor from growing. Am I understanding you correctly?
[00:32:54.18] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah. Actually, this is an interesting thing because it’s also inside our discussion the paper, very small part. Chitin is mostly known among scientists as a carrier, a capsule, where you can put in other pharmaceuticals or other compounds. And most of the researchers don’t think about what the chitin really does. It’s just a capsule, a vehicle to transport our product. Okay, great. But haven’t you realized that maybe The effect that you see is not only the compound, but it can also be a part of the chitin effect? Yeah. So this is most of the time, just forgotten. I mean, people don’t know what the chitin does. It’s good to have it. It’s biodegradable. It’s good for transportation inside the body. And of course, it’s nontoxic. That’s the most important thing. So that’s why it’s a very interesting carrier. So we also put a small part on this in our article just to say, Hey, think about it whenever you use the chitin again, don’t only think about the effects that your compounds may have, but also the chitin may, though. It can also have anti-tumorogenic effects.
[00:34:18.16] – John Knych
Yes. And interesting, I didn’t know that in Japan it was already being sold as a supplement. Yeah.
[00:34:24.20] – Jonas Steenbrugge
I don’t know how it is right now, but at least in the ’90s and so on, ’90s, early 3 milliliters, you could just buy it. I’ve never been to Japan myself, but I would really like to see it. It’s like a chitin suspension. How much does it cost?
[00:34:41.11] – John Knych
And when you say chitin suspension, what do you mean? Is it a liquid with Is there some flakes in it?
[00:34:45.21] – Jonas Steenbrugge
I think so. I’ve never seen it, but I would say it’s like that. I think they just tear the chitin apart, put it into a flask, like a suspension with flakes, probably. How can I Can I tell how it looks? It’s like a grayish… It looks like a mold inside your bottle, but it’s like a grayish flake that you can see. It falls down to the bottom of your flask once you just let it stand for an hour. So it’s not really soluble, right? That’s what I mean with the chitin. And you don’t have that with the chitin. And it just gets into a clear solution, but it doesn’t have the same effect as the chitin has.
[00:35:41.09] – John Knych
So in your opinion, the chitin is better than chituzan, and it needs to be insuible to do its work.
[00:35:49.02] – Jonas Steenbrugge
At least, I don’t know why. Yeah, right? So I think that’s still a big question mark. But reports and literature at least tell so that it’s better to use chitin instead of the chitouzanne. On the other hand, I also find new articles, like very recent ones, that use a very deacetylated form of chitin, also chitosan called, but you have different percentages of deacetylation. So chitosan can also be a very broad family of chitoaligoseccharides. We call it oligosecorides because you have different particle sizes. You cannot They say it’s one type of sacriot. It has different sizes, so that’s why we call it the chitoaligoseccharides. And that’s where they also checked it inside the… I don’t know by a heart. Let me just check because I have it on my computer here. They also injected inside the tumor, this chytuzan, and they got a real anti-tumorogenic response. It also has something to do with immune cells being stimulated. So in a way, I don’t think it’s a black and white story. Chytuzan may work, but maybe in specific contexts and when giving it in a specific manner, injecting it inside the tumor, maybe, and not drinking it or injecting it intravenously.
[00:37:18.08] – John Knych
Yes. So Jonas, I also want to share with you the goal for this interview in our article. So my colleague, she’s in California now, so it’s 2: 00 AM. That’s why she couldn’t join the- Okay, no problem. He’s done medical articles before, and she’s the one with the connection @webmd. Do you know Webmd?
[00:37:40.14] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Well, I’ve heard about it before, but of course, it’s more American website, right?
[00:37:47.19] – John Knych
Yes. And it’s become really the go-to for people with medical questions that want a reliable source. And the working title for the piece, if it’s accepted, is how shrimp shells can help fear cancer. Yeah, great. But the questions that I sent this in the email to you that the editor needs us to answer before they give us the green light is, what’s the data showing what’s going on with chitin? So you mentioned the interesting example of it being consumed in Japan. Is that just what you’ve come across or have you seen any concrete data where the Japanese government or an organization has said, Look, we’ve analyzed people who drank kaitin or kaitosen for 10 years, and those people got tumors that grew much slower than people who- It’s very difficult to find this data.
[00:38:42.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge
You can find some, let’s say, descriptions and review papers. But it’s very difficult to find these data in a raw form. And I’ve I checked multiple times, but very difficult to find them. I can check for this piece, if I can definitely find something. But at least, it’s probably also because it’s so long ago, and some of these articles are not really internationally distributed, and it’s more like an Asian journal, probably. I don’t even know whether it’s in English, but I can check for you whether I can find this real hard data.
[00:39:34.10] – John Knych
If you come across it or if it’s convenient.
[00:39:38.05] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, sure.
[00:39:39.24] – John Knych
Because you mentioned, and I’m going to watch this interview again, you mentioned the Stefani- Stefania Libreros.
[00:39:47.12] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah.
[00:39:47.16] – John Knych
And someone at Brown University.
[00:39:50.03] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, that’s Jack Elias. You will find a lot of stuff about the kite in these three like one. He’s still working on that a lot. And what they do is also So not really work with chitin as a natural product, but they use antibodies against the protein. That’s more a specific way of targeting the chitinase-3-like one protein. But this is a difference with the chitin. What we do with the chitin is actually we target the whole family and not only one specific protein. And this may also be a beneficial thing because we actually, in the paper, compared this this antibody treatments for this specific protein with the chitin treatment. And the chitin treatment was even more efficacious. So you get a better growth reduction with the chitin than with the antibody treatment. So it’s better to actually target the whole family. But it’s difficult to tell how it works on each family member. That’s a whole different story. We specifically focused on this chitinase 3-like one because that’s the main, I mean, investigated We know a lot about it in cancer already, mainly through the Elias group, and it’s another way of targeting it.
[00:41:08.20] – John Knych
I see. So there’s still a lot of mystery about exactly what’s going on.
[00:41:13.10] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, we even don’t really know the function of the protein. So we’re actually still totally in the mist. We find a lot of leads, let’s say, and we find that it’s an interesting therapeutic target, but the exact function is still pretty unclear, even after all these years. It’s even strange that us humans still produce this protein, even though we don’t have a chitin in the skin or something.
[00:41:43.19] – Speaker 3
It’s like, in a way, We lost the chitin throughout the evolution.
[00:41:48.21] – Jonas Steenbrugge
We don’t have this exoskeleton or something, but we kept the proteins that degraded, probably because of a, I don’t know, protective mechanism to boost the immune system once you have an infection. But in the cancer context, this is not a good thing, right?
[00:42:09.16] – John Knych
Could you clarify a little bit more about it’s not a good thing that we have chitin when there’s cancer or tumor because it helps heal the-Yeah.
[00:42:22.04] – Jonas Steenbrugge
So the chitinase 3, like one or the family of chitinases and chitinase-like proteins, they have a healing function. So once you have a wound and an infection going on, the body will respond to that the way they want to clear the infection, and then they want to heal the wound. And these chitinases and chitinase-like proteins, they help in this healing process. So looking at that from a cancer perspective, the healing process is actually stimulating cellular growth. That’s what you do in a healing process.
[00:42:56.03] – John Knych
But then what do you do externally that either prevents that or encourages another process from occurring?
[00:43:04.16] – Jonas Steenbrugge
So that’s where the chitin can turn up in a cancer context. You can use the chitin to block these chitinase-like proteins.
[00:43:13.16] – John Knych
I see.
[00:43:14.17] – Jonas Steenbrugge
And what’s normally going on in an infectious disease is that the chitin from the cell wall of the fungai or whatever bacteria is entering into your body, it gets degraded by the chitinase. Chitanases. And here we have an already degraded version of the chitin that we inject and that blocks the proteins.
[00:43:37.18] – John Knych
I see.
[00:43:38.07] – Jonas Steenbrugge
So it’s- It’s a difficult way of understanding, I know. But think about it as an evolutionary process that’s normally going on when having an infection. And it’s a good thing that we have these chitanase-like proteins to boost our immune system and heal the wounds. But think about that in a cancer context, healing the cancer that actually stimulates the growth. So we need to reverse that process, which is evolutionary and not difficult to do.
[00:44:07.16] – John Knych
Yeah, and you can only use the process using the same substance.
[00:44:11.01] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
[00:44:13.16] – John Knych
Okay. You’ve definitely clearly answered question two of the editor, which is what is chitin’s potential?
[00:44:19.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah.
[00:44:20.09] – John Knych
Out of this- He has an anti-cancer potential. But the last part that he asked us is how far off is chitin from being used fight cancer. So you mentioned that dogs and cats, but if you, let’s say, have all the pieces fall into place, you get funding, you do more studies, if you had to say, when would human trials occur? When would they?
[00:44:44.12] – Jonas Steenbrugge
I think it can go pretty straightforward or even fast forward because, first of all, the chitin suspension has actually already been used in people, just willingly. People just buy it in Japan already in the ’90s. But then again, you need to have this specific particle size to be anti-cancer efficacious. So whenever being able to produce these small particles in a large volume, because that’s what we will need to do to give it to humans. The amount that we give in mice will be much higher in humans. We also don’t know how many times you need to provide it to the people. We think it’s non-toxic, but then again, are we sure, specifically with these small chitin particle sizes? So these are processes or phases, let’s say, that we first need to go through in order to really go to the clinical trial. But I think it will be, let’s say, if we start today, you can maybe already do the trial within 3-5 years, I think. Excellent. That’s just a broad estimation. But yeah, the main, let’s say, reluctancy that most scientists have is that it’s probably not or you will not be able to patent the product because it’s a natural product and there’s already a lot of patents around regarding the chitin.
[00:46:29.03] – Jonas Steenbrugge
So that’s why most Most research are like, okay, man, I’m not going to stick too much time into that because we will probably not get a lot of money out of it. And also the same with companies.
[00:46:43.06] – John Knych
Very interesting.
[00:46:43.20] – Jonas Steenbrugge
If you don’t get a lot of money out of natural product that’s already been used for a long time ago in Asia. So I think that’s the main thing why you don’t see a lot of clinical trials going on. That’s fascinating. But I don’t have any There’s really solid data on that. It’s just like an opinion. That’s always a thing.
[00:47:07.11] – John Knych
Because I never knew this in the cancer research field. Do people express that, look, we’re not going to put tons of time and energy into a path that we couldn’t have a lucrative endpoint, right?
[00:47:26.13] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, of course. We always try to go towards or go towards advantages for the patients. That’s our main goal, right? But then again, in the setting of the scientific field, also with all the institutions wanting more money and so on, you need to have a I mean, like an end goal of any patents where a return of investment can be the case.
[00:47:54.05] – John Knych
And do companies or funding ever put that pressure on you and say, Look, we’ll give you money, but you need to tell us that you have a patent at some certain time?
[00:48:04.06] – Jonas Steenbrugge
You don’t get pressure from companies. That’s not the case. But we get requests from companies to test compounds because we have good models. We have expertise in the field. And that’s when we, from a total… We’re totally not involved into the research of those compounds. So we’re like outsiders, We’re looking at it with it from a clear view, like no prejudices or whatsoever. Then we try to test these compounds into our mouse models. We give our results to them and let them know whether it does or does not work and what maybe the molecular mechanism is behind the compound action. That’s what we sometimes do. That also helps the patients forward because And those compounds are already mostly into clinical trials and so on. And yet there’s a clear patent perspective there because they develop the compound. And sometimes we’re also involved as an inventor because we unraveled the mechanism of action of that compound. That can happen.
[00:49:19.09] – John Knych
I see. But you’re not lucky, but you’re in a good place being part of Ghent University’s Crigg organization. Can you talk a little bit about how you work with people there and your research with Kaya? Are there a lot of other people working with you? What’s the atmosphere there that allows you to do your research Creeg is a great collaborative, let’s say, team of different research groups here in Ghenn University.
[00:49:56.05] – Jonas Steenbrugge
We have people working in the hospital on specific cancer types or specific topics in their field, like immunotherapy, cell death, the microenvironment and how to manipulate it, radiotherapy, you name it. You have a lot of expertise there. We also have connections with other institutions, of course. But Krieg is becoming a pretty well-known name inside Belgium and also outside of Europe. Relationship, even. It’s a great atmosphere for collaboration. You have a lot of collaborating teams. We also have a coordinator of the whole Krieg. It has a board with a lot of members. We also have connections with the industry who know Creech.
[00:50:52.04] – Speaker 3
Whenever they have a request for additional testing of compounds or something or ideas, They first come to the chairperson or people involved in the board, and then they send it out to different labs that may have the tools or the expertise to help those companies.
[00:51:15.01] – Jonas Steenbrugge
We also sometimes have a spin-off from Krieg that even happens. If we find new compounds or new treatment candidates, it can happen that we eventually develop or some spin-offs develop from Krieg.
[00:51:31.12] – John Knych
Excellent. Is everyone who you’ve interacted with that Krieg on board with chitin, meaning they’re aware of your research, they think you’re going down the right path, or are there some people who go, Look, you’re wasting your time. There are other things to be- No.
[00:51:46.09] – Jonas Steenbrugge
People know the products, and they were really interested in the research, specifically the clinicians, really. They were really interested because they were like, This is an interesting way to treat our patients in a non-toxic way. It can be cheap, can be easy to make. This may be a really good way to go forward, even in different kinds of cancers. It doesn’t necessarily need to be used in breast cancer alone. It can also be used in endometrial cancer or ovarian cancer, which has still a huge burden towards treatment. So yeah, there was a lot of interest in the research. We presented it also in our yearly meetings. A lot of input from other groups that want to go forward with it, too.
[00:52:43.23] – John Knych
And this was recent, right? You must have presented it to me.
[00:52:47.11] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah. So I also went to the US with a collaborating group in University of Colorado, where we specifically also focused on the chitinase 3. 1. As the family member that is the most important one, let’s say, or as far as we know, or the one that is mostly done research on. And that’s where We checked how this protein is also involved into the metastatic process of breast tumors. We found that the chitin can block the protein. That’s what we already knew. But blocking this protein also prevents It connects the tumor from metastases into the lymph nodes, specifically lymph nodes. It’s like the first process that the breast tumor is going through once it wants to go to distant organs. It first spreads to the lymph nodes, and from there on, it can spread to different parts of the body. And you can actually prevent or reduce that process by giving a chitin or blocking that chitin is three-like-one protein. That’s where I specifically focused on there in the US. I also presented my results on chitin there at the University of Colorado. We’re also some people from the University of Texas there, MD Anderson, and they were like, Wow, man, this can be really interesting because you can tell people in an easy way that eating box can help them in preventing getting breast cancer in a way that you can look at it from that It’s true, but it’s not that easy.
[00:54:32.21] – Jonas Steenbrugge
You have the small particle size, the necessity of having those 1-10 micrometer sizes with the chitin. And also, you still need to get it digested. If it’s still a complete buck, your body needs to digest it into those small parts. It’s never going to happen. So you need to produce those small particle sizes and digest that.
[00:54:55.20] – John Knych
What’s the word you’re saying? Complete buck? Yeah, like a complete buck.
[00:55:00.11] – Jonas Steenbrugge
I mean, like an insect that you- Oh, bug.
[00:55:02.15] – John Knych
Okay.
[00:55:03.07] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah. This is like the thing, right? Like a lot of proteins inside the box. You can fry it and you can eat them. So in that way, yeah, chitin is like a booming business. I mean, a lot of people start to eat this bug fruit, and it’s also a lot inside the new pet foods. So probably the pet foods nowadays also contain a bit of chitin. Cannot prove that, but I guess that it is the case.
[00:55:32.22] – John Knych
Yes. So it can be preventative by just consuming it, but then also there is a cancer and you can treat it.
[00:55:41.09] – Jonas Steenbrugge
So they specifically told this with the a collective of treating women that get pregnancy-associated breast cancer. This is a specific breast cancer that a group in the US is working on. So these are patients that pretty much quickly after the breastfeeding, they develop a breast tumor because when stopping the breastfeeding, it involutes, so the memory gland is becoming smaller. Because the milk doesn’t need to flow through again. So you get a tearing down of the breast tissue. That’s a normal evolutionary process.. Yeah, in that evolutionary process, you can also get cancer because it’s a huge inflammatory process going on. And sometimes things go wrong. You can also have a more genetic predisposition for that cancers. But when having that cancer, most of the time you’re a young female, and you have a bad prognosis because those cancers, they are pretty aggressive. That’s where they say, maybe we can give the people that are genetically predisposed already and have depressed feeling, you maybe already give the chitin as a preventive measure to prevent tumors or tumors developing into those involuting breasts. And nowadays, they already give anti-inflammatory agents like ibuprofen, I don’t know, the NSAIDs, as we call them.
[00:57:27.07] – Jonas Steenbrugge
This is what they sometimes already use to prevent it’s the growth of these tumors. But again, NSAIDs, they’re not good for the kidneys and so on, so they have a bit of a toxicity when being exposed to them for a longer period. So chitin may be a good alternative, a natural product. I mean, yeah, that’s where they were really interested in.
[00:57:53.18] – John Knych
Yes. Natural biodegradable.
[00:57:55.24] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, exactly. Non-toxic.
[00:57:59.01] – John Knych
Excellent. Well, Jonas, those are all the questions that I have, and I’m going to keep researching to try and find even more concrete data, because when you present it at Colorado, Were there any other people there presenting about chitin, or were you the only one? In the field right now, what’s the state of the field?
[00:58:27.05] – Jonas Steenbrugge
With the chitin, you mean? Yeah. It’s still It’s difficult to find a lot of new papers. Whenever finding stuff about chitin, it’s always in a carrier way, using it as a carrier, as you said, too. And it always turns out to be focused on the compound inside the carrier and never about the chitin. Chitin is just, Okay, we use chitin as a carrier because it’s easy to use, it’s biodegradable, and it transports our product pretty well. That’s it. End of story. But having real in-depth studies on the chitin, difficult to find. I’m also constantly on the look out. But even before our study, the only concrete study on chitin that we found was the libreros paper from 2012. So that’s already more than 10 years ago. And before this paper, we also published a paper on the use of chitin also, but in a mastitis context. I can also send you that paper if you’re interested. So that’s actually like a memory gland infection. So you can also reduce that infection in a way by giving chitin. Again, blocking the proteins. It’s like an immunomodulation. You cannot really prevent the growth of the bacteria. That’s not what you’re doing, but you’re reducing the immune stimulation so that it doesn’t get too exaggerated.
[01:00:05.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Different kinds of contexts. But I think you were mostly focusing on cancer, right? That was your main topic. Yeah, that’s why I didn’t I don’t know if you want to go into detail about that.
[01:00:16.22] – John Knych
Yes. No, but it’s all about what the editor is interested in us exploring. And if WebMD decides that we don’t have enough information, I’m going to pitch to other American magazines like New Scientist, Smithsonian, are publications interested in cutting-edge medicine?
[01:00:38.06] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah. Great. Okay. Will you need to have more input from me? Do I need to check some articles, or how do we proceed here?
[01:00:52.04] – John Knych
It all depends on just what you’re interested in. With your view, I’m going to share it with my colleague. We’re going rewrite up our, rewrite our pitch to her editor at WebMD and see what he says. Him or another editor may say, We need even more, in which case I may reach out to you again and say, either Can we have another conversation or can we find me on where we can find certain information? But I’m optimistic. I really enjoyed this talk and you opened my eyes to really what’s going on in this field. So I’m optimistic that this is enough.
[01:01:31.17] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Okay. But I’ll be- Never think about shrimp the same way. Whenever you will eat shrimp, you’re going to think about, Okay, if I eat the shell, I may be able to prevent some cancer here. Yeah.
[01:01:44.21] – John Knych
And that’s the interesting element is that this combination of it being just this simple, right, shrimp shell versus something that could change how we treat cancer.
[01:01:58.07] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, exactly.
[01:02:00.22] – John Knych
Yeah. So again, I’m optimistic that this will be enough for the editor, but I’m not the one with the connection. It’s my colleague who’s worked at WebMD before.
[01:02:11.15] – Jonas Steenbrugge
I think there’s one additional US group, but I don’t think it’s on the context of cancer, who was also focusing on like, shrimp shells and turning into chitin. I can look that up for you. So maybe that’s another connection that you can put inside the I will send you the details if I can find it back, but I don’t know by heart what’s the topic about with the use of chitin. It was not cancer as far as I know. And also a press release and stuff like…
[01:02:48.24] – John Knych
When I originally wanted to work on this with my colleague, I wanted to explore things that you talked about. It’s anti-inflammatory concepts, like all the broad applications, but usually the editors, they want you to narrow it down to bite size. So someone on WebMD-Easy to read. Easy to read and just go, Oh, what’s a new cancer thing? Our shrimp shells can help cure cancer. But that being said, if I reach out to a different news organization or journal and magazine in the US, they might say, Oh, we want you to do more. Yeah. But one more question, Jonas. So you said earlier on in the conversation that you’d love to talk to Stephanie at Yau, who did the 2012 piece. Even though you haven’t talked with them before, do you have- We emailed a couple of times.
[01:03:44.22] – Jonas Steenbrugge
That’s already a long time ago.
[01:03:47.04] – John Knych
Why did they stop if they published this good article on chitinism?
[01:03:51.05] – Jonas Steenbrugge
I think they’re focusing on… They went through with the chit in a while, focusing on this chitinism, like one proie I’m looking into. But now they’re looking into different topics, not specifically cancer-related. She also left the group and went to another institute because of a post-hoc and so on. I don’t know. Also the chitin for us, it’s a part of projects, so it will probably return someday. But we’re also not really looking into that now very specifically with other projects. We’re more looking into more targeted approaches now, for example, antibody treatments, because most of the time, it’s like I said, you need to have a patentable product. It needs to be very specific with chitin. It’s a really broad blockade that you’re doing. And that again, specifically for granting agents, funding agencies. They really want to have this very pinpointed approach. And that’s where you need to use antibodies instead of broad blocking, chitin natural products. But We’ll always use it as a a positive control because it has a better anti-cancer effect than targeting one specific family member. The thing that we’re focusing now on is actually, again, to reduce this inflammatory process in cancer and stimulate the immune system and also having a synergy with immunotherapy, where not only blocking this chitinase 3-like one family member is the main member of the chitinases, but also combining it with other protein targets, also stimulating the immune system.
[01:05:58.08] – Jonas Steenbrugge
So have a triple targeting blocking approach. The more members you’re blocking, the better. But always in a very specific manner.
[01:06:10.05] – John Knych
Okay. No, thank you for that. Now, you’ve also expanded my knowledge just on how cancer is fought, generally.
[01:06:16.11] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah, I always try to tell students, because cancer is such a complex disease. You can never say, Oh, there’s a tumor growing, and your body starts to react to it, and that’s it. You always need to think It’s not about it in a way like it’s an evolutionary process. It’s like an infection going the wrong way. Your body tries to tackle the infection, tackle the protein, or tackle the tumor, sorry. But the tumor uses evolutionary processes to hamper that effect.
[01:06:50.22] – John Knych
Yes.
[01:06:51.22] – Jonas Steenbrugge
And that’s why it’s so difficult to treat it. You’re targeting evolution. So nature will always find different ways to I mean, find other paths to still stimulate the growth of tumor.
[01:07:05.06] – John Knych
Yes. Yeah. No, it’s a complicated, difficult disease. Well, Jonas, I have to run because I got to work. I teach at one o’clock. Okay. No problem. I really enjoyed this conversation. I’ll be in touch about how this progresses. And thank you for your research and what you’re doing.
[01:07:29.16] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Yeah. No, thank you for this interview. It was very nice talking to you.
[01:07:33.20] – John Knych
Yes. No, I’ll be in touch.
[01:07:35.24] – Jonas Steenbrugge
Okay. Perfect.