Madison Resident Searching for an Answer for Breast Cancer

If Dr. Kathleen Ruddy has her way, and if early evidence is directing her and her foundation in the right direction, that sucking sound you hear from the health care  system will be a different one.

Instead of a vacuum taking money from the population, the noise will be coming from the cost curve.

"If you can show 40 percent of breast cancer is caused by a virus, you could start to take that off the table," said the Madison resident. "Reducing the incidents of breast cancer by 40 percent is going to save a ton of money, much more than trying to convince women to exercise or to stop drinking alcohol."

Ruddy is a breast cancer surgeon whose private practice is located at Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville, where she had been the medical director of the breast service she helped create. But more importantly to her, and hopefully for those who are and may be afflicted with breast cancer, she is the founder of Breast Health & Healing and the Pink Virus Project.

The Pink Virus Project is a collaboration Ruddy has formed to combine the efforts of different scientists, foundations, hospitals, and patient advocates to raise the awareness of the Mammary Tumor Virus, or what Ruddy calls the Pink Virus.

To understand Ruddy's vision, on must first know about the Mouse Mammary Tumor Virus.

"Just before I started my Masters program at McGill (University in Montreal), I quite accidentally discovered there was a virus that had originally been identified in 1936, a virus in mice which causes breast cancer in 95 percent of the mice it effects," said Ruddy, who was part of the first International Masters for Health Leadership at McGill. "There is now rather suggestive, and some would say compelling, research that is possibly linking this virus, or a virus very similar to it, with a significant portion of human breast cancer."

The Mouse Mammory Tumor Virus was discovered by biologist John Brittner more than 60 years ago. When Ruddy discovered the virus, she was both stunned and intrigued. Stunned because she couldn't understand how something like this could have been missing from all of the text books she had read over the years, and intrigued because, she thought, if a virus can cause cancer in mice, why can't it be a cause in women?

So why hasn't the medical community done a full blitz to find out if a virus could be a cause of human breast cancer?

Ruddy said that one of the main reasons may be that health care in the United States has become very focused on diagnosis and treatment. She said that the explosion around that focus began in the 1940s and '50s. She said third party payment allowing patients to get the diagnosis and treatment while virtually paying nothing, and government funding, helped make that happen.

"It was a huge medical system geared to providing diagnosis and treatment, and third parties fueling the system," Ruddy said. "The problem was it was horrificly inflationary, that profit is built into every little piece of the system, so that it costs more than a similar system would if it was publicly funded."

She said that because of this, the search to understand what might be causing breast cancer was lagging behind, including what she calls the Pink Virus.

That's why Ruddy has started the foundation. As Ruddy says, there is enough evidence to indict the virus as a cause of human breast cancer, now she wants to put it on trial.

So what is the evidence Ruddy says indicts the virus?

Two separate researchers have gone into pathology departments and, while using different groups of slides at the separate institutions, found evidence of the virus about 40 percent of the time in the breast cancer specimens.

Ruddy also said researches have found evidence of the virus in 60 percent of pregnancy associated breast cancer, and in 75 percent of inflammatory breast cancer.

A more compelling reason why Ruddy wants to continue looking at the virus is that research has shown that when looking at a mastectomy where there is a lot of other normal breast tissue to look it, the virus exists in the breast cancer but it doesn't in the normal tissue. Also, of the women who have been found with the virus in their breast cancer, 95 percent have the virus in their bloodstream, while women without the virus in their cancer rarely ever have it in their bloodstream.

Finally, one researcher showed that there was increasing evidence that the presence of the virus was associated with not only an increased risk of breast cancer, but the aggressiveness of the cancer.

It has become Ruddy's goal, and that of the Pink Virus Project of the Breast Health & Healing Foundation, to find funding to research the virus and come up with an answer to "does a virus cause breast cancer in women?"

"If the answer is no, fine. We can take it off the table; there are a lot of other things we can do here," Ruddy said. "If the answer is yes, then we would treat that form of cancer differently, so women who have the viral form of breast cancer could be given, say, antiviral therapy. Women who have the virus but haven't developed breast cancer could be given therapy the same way we give people who are HIV positive antiviral therapy so they don't develop AIDS. And furthermore, we could develop a vaccine so we could help prevent everyone else from getting this form of the disease.

"So that seems like an area of inquiry of investigation not only worthwhile, but that can save millions of lives and save billions of dollars. So I've become quite passionate about getting an answer for this question, and that's the Pink Virus Project."

Ruddy held a summit on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., to craft a plan with the scientists and other stakeholders involved to decide what is needed and what is a potential time frame for answering the question about the virus. Ruddy says with a specific goal, time frame, and gameplan, others will be more readily willing to give support and financial backing to the project.

She likens it to the space program and how John F. Kennedy came up with a plan to put a man on the moon within a finite period of time.

"The plan as we see it is, we need $25 million for five years' worth of work and we think that will take us across the finish line and get the information we need to really make a case if this virus causes breast cancer in women," Ruddy said. "We'll be looking for money from multiple sources. It would be great if Bill Gates would write me a check, and we'll all start working overtime. But failing Bill Gates or Bill Clinton coming to the rescue, which I expect someday they will, we'll look at multiple sources, hold our own fundraisers, private donations, as well as going after money from other institutions."

Those interested in donating can do so through the foundation, a non-profit, through its Web site, www.breasthealthandhealing.com. The Web site is one way she has raised awareness of the virus and the project.

Another way is through a book she has written, available online, entitled "The Pink Virus."

"I'm hoping that with the power of the Internet to spread word, and having a book that's written for women so that they might understand what is a virus, how might a virus be involved in human breast cancer, what is the evidence involved with the virus, I think once women can read the story and understand it, I think there will be a demand that women will expect that this project be funded and this question be answered," Ruddy said.

If her wishes come true and the question comes back as yes, a virus is a cause of breast cancer, Ruddy believes it could potential help a health care system in need. She believes there is no other way to bend the cost curve other than take disease off the table. She also believes that completely copying the French health care system, rated as tops in the world in 2000 by the World Health Organization, isn't going to work at this stage, either.

"You're not going to be able to superimpose that onto the  system we have right now," Ruddy said. "You aren't even able to play catchup with our system. So I think the that the clever thing to do to make our system more affordable is to get very aggressively involved in understanding the causes of disease and preventing it."

The Pink Virus Project could potentially go toward achieving that goal.