Julia Levy
immunologist

Co-discoverer of photosensitizer anti-cancer drugs

"The most important thing Never shut off your options. You never know what the next year is going to bring, especially when you're growing up, and to cut off your options in terms of your education or where you want to go, what you want to do, how you want to do it is the worst mistake anyone can make. It's not that you can't go back and start again, but it's very hard to retrace your steps. If you leave your options open, then when something happens you know 'That's where I want to go.' And you do it! You should never box yourself in."

The Person 

Birthdate May 15, 1934
Birthplace Singapore
Residence Vancouver, BC
Office Quadra Logic Technologies, Vancouver

Family Members 
  ¥ Father Guillaume Albert Coppens, banker. 
  ¥ Mother Dorothy Francis Coppens, physiotherapist. 
  ¥ Spouse Edwin Levy, Vice President Corp. 
     Development, Quadra Logic. 
  ¥ Two children, and two grandchildren. 
  ¥ Has one sister.

Title Senior Vice President, Chief Scientific Officer, 
         Quadra Logic Technologies

Status Working at Quadra Logic and as professor at 
              UBC.

Degrees 
  ¥ BA 55 Biology, UBC 
  ¥ PhD 58 Microbiology, University College, London

Awards 
  ¥ Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada 1980 
  ¥ BC Science Council Gold Medal for Medical Research 
    1982 
  ¥ Killam Senior Research Prize 1986

Mentor Her mother, who, in the 1940s had to support the family while her father was in a concentration camp.

Character Determined, impatient, shy.

Favourite Music Vivaldi flute concertos

Other Interests 
  ¥ Piano, gardening
  ¥ Family and kids
  ¥ Cooking
  ¥ Writing fiction
  ¥ Has a cedar cabin on Sonora Island.

The Story

It was 1986 and Julia Levy was giving a talk in Waterloo, Ontario. She met the people who were doing photodynamic therapy. "For the first time, I became aware that we were talking about real patients being treated for real cancer, says Levy. The doctors were very upset with Johnson & Johnson for closing down their Photofrin research program. So many people were being helped by this technology but soon they would not be able to get the drug. " That was a very upsetting experience for me," says Levy. But it was also very exciting.

That night on the plane flying back to Vancouver she began thinking, "We're in the business of photodynamic therapy. We should get into this at the first level and we should maybe start making Photofrin at least for the Canadian investigators." She sat pondering this the whole way home and became very excited. She got off the plane in Vancouver and called her business partner, Jim Miller and said "We've got to do something." Levy wasn't thinking about big financial take- overs. She just wanted to help those cancer sufferers. "Let's make the product. We know how to make it," she said. But Miller replied, "We'll take over the company." They partnered with the pharmaceutical giant, American Cyanamid, raised $15 million and did it. That was a major turning point for Quadra Logic.

"Being in business--in commercial science--focuses your science," says Levy. "The big difference between University and commercial science, is not the quality of the research. It's your awareness that as you move a drug forward towards getting it into a patient, towards getting a treatment perfected, every step costs about 10 times as much, and therefore you cannot afford to make mistakes. Maybe that's why it suits my personality because I don't like retracing my steps anyway. I like to do it right the first time. You can't afford too many goofs when a single experiment costs $50,000."

In April of 1993 the Canadian government approved photofrin for the treatment of bladder cancer. Other cancers of the skin, lung, stomach and cervix are also treatable.

Levy is now starting a fantastic new program to treat auto-immune diseases such as arthritis, psoriasis (a skin disease), and multiple sclerosis with a second generation photodynamic drug called BPD. "It's way beyond cancer," says Levy. She and her team are curing arthritic mice by injecting them with BPD and placing them in a red-light box a few hours later to activate the drug. "We're the only people in the world doing this," says Levy. "The exciting thing is that everything we've touched our hands to has turned out positively."

History

Levy grew up in Vancouver. Even as a little girl, she was interested in biology. On weekends she would come home from Queen's Hall boarding school in Vancouver and go for walks with her mother in the woods below 41st avenue. Their dog would romp along collecting stray dogs who would stay at their house for up to several days. Sometimes Julia would take a sieve and a jar to bring back frog's eggs so that she and her sister could grow tadpoles in the basement wash basins. Later

¥ She enjoyed mathematics in high school, and had a particularly inspiring woman biology teacher in grade 11. ¥ She got a degree in microbiology from UBC. 
¥ She got a PhD at University College in London, Eng.
¥ Became a professor of microbiology at UBC. 
¥ Founded her own drug company, Quadra Logic Technologies Inc., with several other university professors.

The Science 

1. Photodynamic drug injected into the blood stream.

2. Lipoproteins in blood carry the drug to all parts of the body.

3. BPD (BenzoPorphyrin Derivative) drug developed by Levy and company is transported in the blood inside lipoprotein, a complex protein that carries fatty material.

4. BPD brought inside cancer cell by lipoprotein.

5. Cancer Cell. Several hours after the injection, cancer cells, which grow faster than normal cells accumulate ten times more BPD than normal cells in the body.

6. Fibre-optic Laser Into Lung. Using a fibre optic scope, doctors can enter the lung and find the cancer tissue. Then red laser light with the wavelength of 690nm is sent down the fibre optic probe. The light activates the BPD molecules creating free oxygen molecules which react with the cancer cell and effectively "burn" it up.

7. Cancer tumour in lung being destroyed by photodynamic therapy.

Activity

To understand why Levy and her team use red laser light to activate their photodynamic drugs, try this experiment.

You'll Need A good flashlight.

What to do 
¥ Turn on the flashlight and put your hand over it, or put your mouth around the bright end. 
¥ What colour is the light that you see through your hand or cheeks?

Why it works Our bodies are mostly transparent to red light. The red laser light at 690 nanometer wavelength that Levy uses to activate photodynamic drugs passes right through skin and flesh. Even hemoglobin, the protein that makes blood red, does not absorb red light at that wavelength.

Why do you think red light passes through our bodies?

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