Hadiyah Green watched helplessly as a monster slowly ravaged her precious aunt and uncle. Her aunt’s hands that once dutifully cleaned homes shriveled away at the mercy of the “woman’s cancer” she willingly left untreated, rather than allow chemo and radiation to steal what little life she had left. Just 3 months after her aunt’s death, her uncle’s rich mahogany skin deteriorated to burnt parchment when the poisons treating his esophageal cancer behaved like an atom bomb, causing total fallout.

“I got to see, with both of them, firsthand, the horrors of cancer, and the horrors of cancer care. It was so devastating that it fell on my heart that there has to be a better way,” she recalls.

When Hadiyah didn’t find one, she put her 3 degrees in physics and optics to work at making a better way herself. Though it was a little out of the ordinary for a physicist to operate in biology, Hadiyah is rather accustomed to standing out. She’s one of fewer than 100 African-American women in the United States with a PhD in Physics among over 22,000 white male peers.

Being a young woman, a woman of color, and a physicist in the field of cancer research may position 37-year-old Hadiyah as an anomaly, but she’s capitalized on her fresh perspective and profound personal motivations to do what no one else before her could — laser-target and destroy cancer cells with no side-effects, no outrageous treatment recovery times, all in a couple of weeks.

Hadiyah’s groundbreaking treatment actually works as a four-in-one, cancer-beating Swiss Army knife — early detection, imaging, direct targeting and selective treatment are all possible with her “particle target laser therapy.” It works much more simply than it sounds.

Tumors on/at the skin’s surface are injected with an FDA-approved serum carrying nanoparticles that only attach to cancer cells. When, and only when, those nanoparticles are heated with a laser, cancer cells are burned and destroyed at the microscopic level. After only 10 minutes, tumors are visibly affected, and within 15 days, gone altogether.

The procedure for internal tumors is slightly different, but could be even more significant as it can identify cancers before they turn symptomatic. In this case, fluorescent antibodies carrying the nanoparticles are injected, then attack cancerous cells. The antibodies’ tell-tale glow reveals the cancer on imaging scans, the laser directly targets the nanoparticles, and again the growth is killed while healthy tissue goes unscathed. After just one treatment, 40% of the mass is eliminated.

Hadiyah’s results are so groundbreaking that she’s received approval for HUMAN testing. All she needs is the money. And of course, that number is staggering. Even with all the funding she’s received in awards and research grants, including $1 million from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Research & Development, Hadiyah still needs millions more to make her clinical trials a reality. And she’s adamant about not standing by while the cancer epidemic that stole her grandparents ravages the country too. The American Cancer Society estimates that approximately 1.9 million new cases of cancer were diagnosed last year, and over 600,000 people will die in the United States from some form of the disease this year alone. Hadiyah’s therapy is proven on colorectal, ovarian, cervical, breast, brain, pancreatic, bladder, skin and prostate cancers that claimed over 250,000 lives in 2019 that she might have saved. Black women like Hadiyah’s dear aunt Ora Lee are most at risk.

Still, fighting the cancer itself is only part of the goal for Hadiyah. “I want to be a good steward over this technology, and I want it to be available to people that don’t have insurance, to people that are underinsured who may not have other alternatives, who can’t afford the pharmaceuticals, who have been sent home to die,” Hadiyah insists. “If I don’t protect it, nobody else will.” It’s why she’s shunned big pharmaceutical companies that might seek to profit from her work in exchange for funding it, and instead, created her own non-profit research organization, the Ora Lee Smith Cancer Research Foundation.

Nearly every step that Hadiyah’s taken to revolutionize cancer research has been unorthodox or extraordinary, and yet she’s beyond humble about the game-changing work she’s done. “It looks like I’m special, but I’m not. I’m no different from anybody else. When opportunity found me, I was prepared.” The opportunity to be a miracle-worker for future cancer patients is an absolute dream, but there’s one more way Hadiyah hopes to leave her mark on the world. “When I was growing up I didn’t see an example of a Black female scientist…, and when I thought of a physicist, I thought of Albert Einstein,” she explains. “I did not get here by myself. Because of that clarity, I know my responsibility to encourage and mentor the next generation. I hope in the future people will also think of me, a Black female physicist.”

In a future where her treatment is successful & the world is cancer-free, it’s certain Dr. Hadiyah-Nicole Green won’t need to worry about that.

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