Once in a while you see a story that is also inspiring. Here we have a string of new ideas been tried
out and properly funded in a way that plausibly short circuits a lot of the
research approval process. New question
get asked and possibly answered and old biases are also been tested in this
list as they well should be.
A researcher must be allowed to take a chance because wrong is also
an answer to a vexing problem.
Hopefully they have a sniff of success and everyone else piles into
the game. It is thinking like that that
made the Silicon Valley . Thankfully there is so much knowledge loose
today that there is almost an unending supply of such opportunities.
Taking a gamble on
innovative cancer research
DAKSHANA BASCARAMURTY
Last updated
Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012 7:10PM EST
Medical technologists preparing sections of
biopsy samples at the Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Toronto General Hospital
A funny thing happens when a growing group of
health researchers compete for a shrinking pool of funding: Innovation takes a
back seat.
“At the end of the day, [peer-review panels]
are reluctant to take a chance with limited dollars on supporting those really
innovative proposals and that’s particularly true when we’re talking about
donor dollars,” said Christine Williams, vice-president of research at the
Canadian Cancer Society, which in 2010/2011 granted $48.9-million to
researchers.
And so her organization is taking a gamble on
23 researchers, who on Wednesday received an average of $200,000 each as part
of a new funding program that supports innovative, unusual and even
counterintuitive projects.
It’s a program Tom Hudson, the president of
the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, applauds. Some types of cancer that
are hard to treat, such as pancreatic cancer, require risky approaches and too
often researchers shy away because they fear they won’t receive funding.
“High risk means many will fail but if it
works, it can have high impact,” he said.
Here are some of the risk takers who received
the Canadian Cancer Society’s innovation grants:
Feed,
don’t starve, a tumour
The
researcher:
Geoffrey Pickering, cardiologist and professor
in the University of Western Ontario’s medicine, biochemistry and medical
biophysics department
The idea:
Starve a tumour of its blood supply to kill
it: That’s the long-held and widely accepted theory in cancer treatment. But
what if you instead fed that tumour and let it grow?
Dr. Pickering’s theory is that if you increase
the blood supply to the tumour until it reaches the point of being “overfed,”
it might not spread any further. Research suggests that when there’s a good
supply of oxygen to a tumour, radiation therapy is also more effective.
He’ll test his hypothesis on mice with a range
of cancers, tracking their blood flow, tumour growth and the spread of cancer.
The
inspiration behind it:
A cardiologist conducting cancer research?
It’s not such a far-fetched idea for Dr. Pickering, who says discoveries in the
way the cardiovascular system functions can be applied. For years he researched
blood-vessel disease, understanding how blood-vessel walls can be kept healthy.
Because the blood vessels tumours build aren’t
very good, Dr. Pickering hypothesized, “maybe, in fact, the imperfect blood
flow in a tumour actually in some ways works against it.”
“If you could improve the blood vessels – even
though it sounds a little bit counterintuitive in some ways – that might be
best in some circumstances,” he explained.
Diagnose
cancer with the help of ancient sea parasites
The
researcher:
Goetz Ehrhardt, immunologist in the University of Toronto
The
idea:.
To Great Lakes
fishermen, sea lampreys are a blood-sucking, fish-killing nuisance. The
sharp-toothed, eel-like creatures may look like they were invented in Tim
Burton’s studio, but they’ve been around for millions of years. To Dr.
Ehrhardt, they could be the key to more effective cancer diagnosis.
In his lab, Dr. Ehrhardt will immunize
sea-lamprey larvae with cancer cells, which will prompt the larvae's immune
systems to produce antibodies. Those antibodies, when isolated, can be used to
diagnose multiple myeloma (which affects the body’s plasma cells) with far
greater specificity than conventional antibodies.
Dr. Ehrhardt says antibodies from the sea
lamprey, that very distantly related species, could potentially be used to
recognize malignant cells for a range of different types of cancer in humans.
“In a way it’s a bit like a parallel universe
but one that has huge application possibilities,” he said.
The
inspiration behind it:
A few years ago, Dr. Ehrhardt was on a
research team that discovered the unique adaptive immune system of the sea
lamprey. They found the protein architecture of the sea-lamprey antibodies was
extremely different from that of a human, or any other mammal for that matter,
which could allow the antibodies it produced to detect structures that
conventional antibodies couldn't.
If this was the case, Dr. Ehrhardt wondered if
lampreys could potentially detect cancers that other antibodies were missing.
Stimulate
the immune system with a virus
The
researcher:
Rebecca Auer, clinical oncologist and
associate scientist of cancer therapeutics at the Ottawa Hospital Research
Institute
The idea:
“The time before and after surgery is
considered this untouchable time where you can’t give any therapies against
cancer because the patient has to heal,” Dr. Auer said.
Problem is, this hands-off period is when a
patient’s immune system is weakened and his cancer can grow and spread.
Dr. Auer wants to understand why one
particular part of the immune system – Natural Killer cells – are suppressed
after surgery, but also how to reverse that. She plans to use a unique type of
virus therapy at the time of the surgery to stimulate those Natural Killer
cells so they continue fighting the cancer in that key period of post-operative
recovery. She’ll test her theory on both animal and human models.
The inspiration
behind it:
During her residency, Dr. Auer worked on a
team that looked at oncolytic viruses – viruses that kill cancers but leave
normal tissues unharmed. Several years later, when she was performing surgeries
on patients with colorectal cancer, she wondered whether there was a place for
new types of therapy, including viruses, in boosting a patient’s immunity
post-surgery.
“If Natural Killer cells are so important
after surgery and they don’t work very well after surgery ... maybe if we
stimulate them with viruses at the time of surgery, we could improve the
outcome of patients,” she said.
Take the
sniper approach to cancer treatment
The
researcher:
Kevin Kane, professor in the medical
microbiology and immunology department of the University of Alberta
The idea:
Consider chemotherapy the atom-bomb approach
to treating cancer: You might achieve the goal of destroying the body’s cancer
cells, but you’ll also annihilate plenty of healthy cells. Dr. Kane’s project
aims to kill cancer like a sniper.
His team will use a new screening technology
to analyze prostate-cancer proteins and figure out which ones can be identified
and targeted by killer cells, a key component of the body’s immune system.
“Our idea is to be able to direct those killer
cells to kill the tumour cells but not surrounding cells,” Dr. Kane said.
The
inspiration behind it:
Dr. Kane read about this unique process used
to screen drugs in which thousands of genes were analyzed at once.
“I saw that that had great potential and
nobody had used it with the immune system,” he said.
He hypothesized that if he knew which proteins
stimulated which killer cells, he’d be able to expand the number of those
killer cells and transfer them back into the patient as a way of treating their
cancer.
Published on Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012 6:53PM
EST
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