Inventing Cancer Cures - Robert E. Fischell

Though no doctor could cure his wife with today’s medicine, inventor Robert E. Fischell wants to change that for tomorrow’s cancer patients. He has given leukemia specialist Judy Karp $1 million to develop new cures that may someday revolutionize cancer research.

A 76-year-old physicist who now creates medical devices, Fischell says that inventing new technologies is not difficult. “The hard part is finding someone to fund new ideas to make them happen.”

Fischell is no stranger to the road of trial and error. He was born in the Bronx, New York, to immigrant parents, and his father never finished the eighth grade. “But there was a love of learning in my family,” says Fischell.

After completing an engineering degree at Duke University, Fischell decided to focus on physics, which, he explained to his father, dealt with the mysteries of electricity, heat and magnetism. “My father said I’d never make a living doing this,” says Fischell. “I’m pleased to report he was wrong.”

Fischell holds more than 150 patents on inventions ranging from satellite technology to medical gadgets. But his most notable work has extended the lives of heart and diabetic patients. He calls his shift in career an “accident.”

“I read an advertisement for batteries in an engineering magazine one evening,” recalls Fischell. According to the advertisement, which pictured an X-ray of a pacemaker, the manufacturer boasted, “our batteries are so good that they last as long as two years.” Fischell believed a two-year battery life in such a device was absurd. 

After consultations with a Johns Hopkins cardiologist, Fischell built a new pacemaker with circuitry found in pulsing traffic warning lights and batteries used to fire explosives that separate a satellite from its space-propelling rockets. Battery life of the new pacemaker: forever. Fischell’s batteries were recharged by passing an alternating magnetic field through the skin.

Now chairman of four medical technology companies, Fischell says this line of work is far more gratifying than any other.  “But success with a satellite can’t compare to the satisfaction of inventing something that gives patients their lives back.”
A sign posted in Fischell’s home office offers says: “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Throughout his career, Fischell has confronted his share of naysayers. “It takes confidence and determination to persevere against those who’ll say your idea is ridiculous,” he says. “The first stage of an invention is thinking that it’ll never work. The second is that it was obvious all along.”

Fischell’s creative mind would be challenged again during one of the many visits his wife, Marian, made to the Kimmel Cancer Center. Karp suggested that since he was an inventor, why not invent a cure for leukemia?

“The next day, there appeared a potential way to do just that,” says Fischell. His theory was that the body may have a magnetic threshold that can kill leukemia cells with electric currents generated by an alternating magnetic field and spare blood-regenerating stem cells. “So I gave them $130,000 to try it.” With these funds, Hopkins researcher Michael McDevitt is exploring whether leukemia cells have a different electrical makeup than normal cells. His findings may provide a window on how to attack these vicious killer cells while sparing a person’s normal stem cells.

Fischell is launching his own attack on leukemia by shoring up Judy Karp’s research arsenal with a $1 million gift. According to Karp, “Leukemia research is still in an early stage. We need to find out how cells get damaged and then why they don’t die. Why doesn’t the body clear them out?” Understanding the nature of myelodysplasia, abnormal development of certain blood, and its ability to outsmart the body’s immune system by allowing rogue cells to mutate into a very aggressive form of leukemia, is among the challenges Karp is taking on in her laboratory.

In the clinic, she’s working on novel therapies, with a special emphasis on older patients who are much more likely to develop myelodysplastic syndrome, which turns into leukemia—the disease that took Marian Fischell’s life. A promising treatment currently in clinical trials combines the drugs tipifarnib (Zarnestra) with etoposide (VP-16).

“Marian was truly a pioneer,” says Karp. “She was willing to be at the forefront of clinical research, not only for herself but for others as well —that is her legacy.”

It is this legacy her husband continues.  “I want to make devices so that when you and your spouse go to the doctor, you can be told, ‘There is a new invention that can save your loved one. Two years ago, that wasn’t possible.’ That achievement is my ultimate goal.”