Driving for a Cure to Breast Cancer

The big pink bus that the Gene Machine once called home is hardly inconspicuous. If you’ve traveled Wire Road at any point over the last seven years, there’s a good chance you spotted the vibrant 2002 Ford Super Duty F-250 from the road, even if you weren’t aware of its connection to Auburn.

“Before joining the lab, I didn’t know what the Gene Machine was,” shared Sheniqua Glover ’18, a graduate student in the Gene Machine lab. “I’ve known a lot of students that recognize the bus and recognize the Gene Machine from the bus, but they don’t necessarily know what that means.”

The Gene Machine is the passion project of Nancy Merner, an associate professor and geneticist in the College of Veterinary Medicine. Kicking off in 2017 with the purchase of the big pink bus, the project’s Gene Machine travels across Alabama to examine the DNA of individuals diagnosed with breast cancer and other associated cancers.

Though it’s unclear who coined the term “Gene Machine,” the pink bus now synonymous with the project once served as both transportation and a mobile blood donation center. However, this changed in February 2023, when 279 donors generously gave during Tiger Giving Day and raised $26,445 for the project. This money went directly to funding Gene Machine Two, a Ford Escape Plug-in Hybrid SUV with detachable magnets for more covert home visits.

Answering questions about the origin of breast cancer

“Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in American women, besides skin cancer,” shared Merner. “One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, so that’s a 13% lifetime chance of developing a particular cancer.”

Many of the men and women that the Gene Machine comes across are surprised to learn that only 10% of breast cancers can be classified as hereditary, meaning caused by mutations in genes inherited from parents. This is because hereditary breast cancer must fit certain criteria, as outlined by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

This means that breast cancers—even in those with a family history of the disease—are not necessarily going to be the product of inherited genes. “Most breast cancers, they’re genetic,” said Merner,” but not anything that you got from your mom and dad. It’s mutations that are occurring in your cells over time. And then, as those mutations accumulate, that’s when it turns into cancer.”

Ross is also the cofounder of Team WHIP (Working to Help Those in Pink), a nonprofit organization in Lanett, Alabama that provides support to survivors and co-survivors in Alabama and Georgia.

Ross’s sister, Jatunn Gibson, who served as an Auburn University assistant professor and extension specialist in Human Development and Family Studies from 2015–2024, also chose to pursue genetic screening, having been diagnosed with breast cancer six years after Ross.

At the time, both women were shocked to learn that their breast cancer diagnoses were not the product of inherited genes, despite their shared family history of breast cancer. These experiences highlight how little we currently understand about hereditary breast cancer—and how important it is that the Gene Machine project fills the gaps.

Merner clarified, “The issue is, if 100 women get genetic screening and they fit all these criteria for hereditary breast cancer, we’re only going to be able to solve maybe 30% of them with what we know today causes breast cancer. So that means that we have 70% of people that fit hereditary breast cancer criteria that we don’t know what the genetic cause is. That’s why research is so important.”

What Dogs Tell Us About Breast Cancer

Though people are often confused when they learn that the Gene Machine is stationed at Auburn’s College of Veterinary Medicine (rather than, say, the College of Human Sciences), it helps to visualize canines as a model of hereditary breast cancer. Through what’s known as comparative genomics, the mutations in the genomes of predominantly inbred dogs can be compared to the mutations in human genomes, and vice versa.

The Gene Machine is not alone in its mission. The Auburn University Research Initiative in Cancer (AURIC), an organization founded in 2012 to unite researchers against cancer, is likewise housed at the College of Veterinary Medicine.

“That [relationship] has everything to do with the World Health Organization’s One Health Initiative,” said Betsy Stallworth ’02, a registered nurse who serves as the project’s recruitment coordinator. “Humans, animals, and the earth are one health. We affect one another and can help one another.”

Stallworth is a major part of the project’s success across the state, contributing to a 60% increase in enrollment in 2024. Despite this growth, she maintains that the focus of the project is the person, not the numbers. “Behind every file of DNA on the screen is a human being. We’re trying to help families. We’re trying to help communities. We’re trying to help the world.”

When the pandemic hit in 2020, however, the Gene Machine team was forced to reformulate its approach. Reaching out to the Alabama Department of Public Health, Merner was granted access to the state’s cancer registry of potential participants, whom they began contacting over email and phone.

Reaching Out To Those In Need

More Than A Number

In 2022, the Gene Machine received a four-year research scholar grant from the American Cancer Society to identify and study the genome sequences of African American women who have hereditary breast cancer. The nearly $800,000 grant is validation not only for Merner’s team but also for those taking part in the research.

As an African American woman taking part in the study, Ross saw the Gene Machine as a positive response to the gaps in public healthcare. “When you go to the doctor, you almost feel like a number. You’re pushed through and you’re pushed out. With the Gene Machine, they have one focus, and that focus is on the gene and to study its actions.”

“We have to make a lot of effort so that other ethnic groups and underrepresented people who participate in research are no longer afraid,” said Merner. “They seem to ask, ‘If I’m giving you a piece of me, then what are you going to do with that?’”

Though this level of medical mistrust is still present among her fellow cancer survivors, Ross believed that the Gene Machine team was working hard to assuage those concerns.

“I do see a hesitance in [survivors]. They’re not quite sure what the study is going to be because some of them still have it embedded in them about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. They just shy away from it, [but] knowledge is rewarding. So if you know you have something, you can pass that along to someone else. You can save a life with it.”

Glover is thankful that she can help encourage participants who may be wary of the study’s intentions. “With me being African American, I can attest personally that [when you see] someone that looks like you, you receive it way better than seeing someone of another ethnicity telling you the exact same thing.”

It’s Personal

During enrollment events, the Gene Machine team makes a point of highlighting the confidentiality of the participants’ DNA samples and personal health information. The supercomputer that is used to store the team’s data is triple password-protected and inaccessible by the internet. All consent forms are also regulated and assessed by the Institutional Review Board.

Though Merner hopes to continue her journey toward making a high-impact genetic discovery and building a strong cohort of researchers, the goal of the Gene Machine remains the same as it was in 2017: to encourage men and women across Alabama to learn all they can about their own personal health.

“You might not think that we’re making a difference, but we are,” Merner said. “We have hundreds of genomes right now, and we’re aiming for thousands. We just have high hopes that we’re going to make a discovery with all these efforts.”

Whether it’s driving down the road in a hybrid SUV–or chugging along in a pink bus that gets nine miles to the gallon–the Gene Machine project is radically altering the future of breast cancer prevention. One gene at a time.

By Chloe Livaudias