Breakthrough in the battle with cancer at Fred Hutch
Aug 3, 2012, 2:00 PM | Updated: Aug 6, 2012, 6:42 am
Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have made another major discovery in the treatment of cancer.
Chemotherapy and radiation treatments are given in stages. A cancer patient can only take so much before their body begins to break down. They need time in between sessions to recover. But it is during that recovery period that Dr. Pete Nelson says the cancer cells themselves can become resistant to the very therapy meant to destroy them.
“It turns out if you take just about any cancer cell in the laboratory, you grow it in the petri dish, it’s actually very easy to kill a cancer cell,” says Dr. Nelson.
Nelson and his colleagues at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center wanted to find out why it was so much harder when those cancer cells were in the human body. What they found is that during the recovery periods healthy cells in the body produce an excess of proteins.
“It turns out, a number of these proteins can then change those tumor cells to become resistant to the next type of treatment, the next cycle,” Nelson says.
The researchers not only confirmed that the proteins are produced in people. They were also able to confirm that, at least in the lab, blocking the protein would improve the outcome of cancer treatment.
“WNT-16 is produced about 30 times or 30 fold increased in response to the treatment damage, and if we blocked that WNT-16 then we improved the effectiveness of the chemotherapy,” says Nelson.
It is that particular protein, WNT-16, that they want to study further. They would like to develop a drug specifically to block its production. It would be something that could be given to cancer patients before they start chemo or radiation.
“WNT-16 in our study accounted for about 30 to 40 percent of this effect, but there are several others that would also be very attractive drug targets,” Nelson says.
It is possible they might not even have to create new drugs. There could already be protein inhibitors on the market that are simply approved for different uses. In that case, Nelson says patients could benefit from this new knowledge even sooner.
“I’m cautious, but optimistic,” says Nelson.
