About Jesse

Dr. Jesse Salk is a scientist and medical doctor who studies and teaches about cancer. Jesse grew up in Seattle and went to The Evergreen School, just down the street. As a kid, he liked figuring out how things worked (which sometimes lead to taking apart things that he wasn’t supposed to) and building things (which sometimes meant he was distracted in the middle of class). He had some very good teachers who recognized the things he was best at and encouraged him to study science. As he went through high school and college he decided that he especially liked medical science, because it meant the things he was studying and creating would help sick people and find ways to keep others healthy. He went to medical school to learn to treat patients, and also to graduate school to learn how to be a researcher. Jesse likes to ski and rock climb and ice climb out in the mountains, which is where he gets some of his best ideas. He still likes to build things and take gadgets apart and dig holes in his garden, and go on trips to explore new places with his wife and young son.

Recently, Jesse and several colleagues published the results of a scientific study that explored a method for early detection of ovarian cancer. Unlike colon, breast, and cervical cancers which all have screening tools (colonoscopies, mammograms, and pap smears, respectively) that have been proven to save lives, there is no effective screening tool for ovarian cancer. Because of this, more than 60% of women who are diagnosed are already at an advanced stage of cancer. Typically, survival rates for people diagnosed at late stages are only around 29% (compared to survival rates above 90% for early diagnosis). Developing such an effective screening tool for ovarian cancer would help save many lives. While screening tools do exist for ovarian cancer, they often result in “false positives” (the test detects cancer when there isn’t actually any there) which can lead to unnecessary surgeries or treatments in cancer-free women, and have not been shown to reduce cancer deaths.

In the last decade, scientists have found that cancer cells can shed “cancer DNA” into blood or body fluids and that the cancer can be detected by sampling the liquid without a surgical biopsy. Jesse and his colleagues were inspired to use this knowledge to more effectively detect ovarian cancer. Using a uterine lavage (a procedure where the lining of the uterus and fallopian tubes is washed with liquid to collect loose cells and DNA) and one of the most sensitive DNA sequencing tools available, they were able to detect ovarian cancer mutations (specifically one called “TP53” that is associated with the most common--and serious--type of ovarian cancer) with an 80% success rate.

One interesting finding was that they detected the TP53 mutation even in healthy tissues from women without cancer. In fact, those mutations were present in uterine lavage samples collected from women spanning a century of age--from newborns to 100-year-olds. The number of mutations they found in samples increased with the age of the woman they were collected from. This study was important because it showed that it is possible to successfully detect ovarian cancer in its early stages, and that doctors and researchers must be very careful to distinguish which TP53 mutations come from tumors, and which are there simply as a result of natural human aging.