Mike Kilen

mkilen@dmreg.com

Two mouse clicks in David Soll’s University of Iowa biology lab is all it takes to understand.

The first click is a real horror film: 3-D images of the first-ever tracking of cancer cells’ motion and accretion to tumors, which his lab released earlier this year. Globs of nasty cancer cells extend what looks like a probe, pulsing and reaching out to other cells to pull into a tumor.

The second click fights the horror: It’s a group of images of cancer cells. But between them are gaps you could drive a busload of cells through. Monoclonal antibodies Soll has identified have essentially stopped the probing and formation of model tumors. Those gaps represent a world free of cancer.

“Unbelievable,” Soll murmured.

He is the first to say it’s a long way to any big claim — years of painstaking research may prove it all a bust. But this is his work now, day and night, trying to find a way to potentially stop the cause of a quarter of all U.S. deaths.

It’s personal. Soll’s wife Michele Morice died of cancer six years ago. In his ensuing grief, the acclaimed biologist changed the focus of his research from infectious fungi to cancer.

He had an advantage. Soll sits on the largest noncommercial hybridoma bank in the world. As director of the Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank created by the National Institutes of Health in 1986, Soll's bank ships out dozens of antibodies every day that are housed at the University of Iowa for scientists across the world to use for research.

A quick science lesson: A hybridoma is formed when a B cell is combined with a cancer cell. The hybridoma secretes monoclonal antibodies that in recent years have excited cancer researchers. Find the right one and it may be able to stop cancer cells from growing and making tumors.

Just like the one responsible for the healthy image on Soll’s screen.

“Private companies are starting to come in for lunch and to sniff the air,” he said.

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Soll met Morice in the late 1980s. He was divorced from his first wife and driven in his work. He even pumped out chapters for college textbooks while sitting in the back of a bar and restaurant called The Mill in Iowa City, where Morice was a waitress.

“I loved to party, and I wasn’t going to marry someone else,” he said. “Then I met her. She saved me from my debauched lifestyle.”

Soll, 74, grew up in the Italian Jewish ghetto of south Philadelphia with a prize-fighter father who loved boxing, reading and his wife but didn’t much like his three sons, Soll said. Yet, he made them read books. That changed Soll's life.

Soll graduated from the notorious Boys Central High School in Philly to a pick of high-end colleges.

“But I loved the drinking in Wisconsin, so I went to the University of Wisconsin and got three degrees,” he said.

He married, had a child, and set out making a name for himself, only sleeping an hour or two every night, while pioneering research on the vaginitis yeast Candida. He started companies and secured patents in agriculture areas, a whirlwind of fast-talking energy since he walked into the UI doors in 1972.

“My mom softened him up quite a bit,” said Soll’s daughter Samantha Soll, 34, a clinical psychologist in Chicago. “She was very much a loving human being and it was contagious for him.

“He is a tough guy. But he loved her in a way you should love somebody. He made sure everything was taken care of when she was sick. He was holding her hand all the time.”

He didn’t leave wife’s bedside for four months, pulling his own bed next to hers and plopping his laptop up to work.

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Cancer. He Googled every important bit of research about it for two months after his wife’s death.

“It’s bad luck, that’s what it is, because it has to do with mutation,” Soll said. “It’s a crap shoot that it metastasizes and you die.

“So when she died I sat down with all my people and said, ‘I don’t want to find a cure for 1 percent of deaths (from specific infectious diseases). I want to find a cure for 25 percent. And this is what this can be. One bullet that can stop tumorigenesis.”

He shifted his passion. It’s one thing he always told his three children: Find a passion and do it all the way.

He did it throughout his early career, writing a paper in 1970 showing that cell differentiation could be preprogrammed without protein synthesis that made him a wunderkind in the scientific community. He wrote a lead article on biological timers in Science magazine in the late 1980s, a rare honor that also overwhelmed his ability to emotionally “catch up to my career.”

“Then I met the luck of my life,” he said.

The relationship with Michele calmed him and he took over the role of director of the hybridoma bank, growing it from 100 to 4,400 hybridomas over the last 20 years.

“He took a small-potatoes operation and turned it into something that is global and really important,” said Steve Alexander, a University of Missouri biology professor. “This is a big deal to get antibodies for research at prices that are reasonable, because scientists have a limited amount of money.”

Soll said the monoclonal antibodies stored at UI are worth $250 million but are sold to 65,000 clients worldwide at a fraction of what commercial concerns sell them for. He pulls up trays from a single waist-high deep freeze holding the specimens — housed behind locked laboratory doors.

Few outside the scientific community in Iowa know about it, he says, but the only thing more famous here is the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

He can use the available antibodies with his lab’s novel 3-D imaging that tracks tumor formations in real time, technology that created real excitement after his piece on it in the American Journal of Cancer Research.

“He’s the smartest man I know,” Alexander said. “He is coming at it from scratch, but he has novel ideas. There is nothing tangential about David Soll. Everything is creative and big picture.”

Soll’s work has identified two monoclonal antibodies that are showing promise in stopping tumor growth. But he said more research is needed before they can interest “deep pockets” from running with them.

His daughter views it as a noble, ethical quest.

“This isn’t for personal gain,” Samantha Soll said. “This is something to make the world a better place.”

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His wife, then.

“We were in love for 30 years,” Soll said. “She was absolutely beautiful and one of the smartest people I met in my life, politically astute, a great mother, fantastic lover and wife. Everything. And I spent a lot of time window shopping, let me tell you. When I met her I was quitting, and that doesn’t happen too often.”

When she was dying, he didn’t tell her that he would spend the rest of his life fighting against what killed her.

He knows she would have a question: Is it something you really love?

His answer now is urgent, so much so that he’s tirelessly working only a couple months after back surgery.

“Time is getting short for me. Because of genetics and the history of my family, I still have 10 more years maximum to pull off what I think I can do, which is to find a generalized drug that can shut down all cancer formation. I’ve already found two but I think we were very, very lucky. I might actually pull this off.”

If he’s successful, David Soll said he will look up to his wife in heaven and tell her that he did it.