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The answer could already be in your medicine cabinet
Before there was St. Elsewhere, ER, Chicago Hope, Gray’s Anatomy and other similar shows focusing on the tragicomic melodramas in a hospital, we had omniscient TV physicians who made house calls and seemed to cure all ailments with one prescription:
“Take two of these and call me in the morning.”
Turns out that might be good medicine when it comes to aspirin. City of Hope researchers, led by Shiuan Chen, Ph.D., director of the Division of Tumor Cell Biology, are investigating the role the common pain reliever may have in breast cancer prevention. Add that to the other benefits scientists worldwide are studying — preventing heart disease, asthma, blood clots, liver damage and more — and the simple pill might be uncommonly powerful.
City of Hope’s study team aims to confirm that aspirin can suppress the expression of aromatase, a substance in the body that helps create estrogen. Since most breast cancers need estrogen to grow, blocking aromatase has proven to be a powerful way to treat breast cancer. In other studies, Chen has demonstrated how mushrooms, pomegranates and grape seed extract are “super foods” that seem to have a natural ability to block aromatase.
Using the California Teachers Study, an ongoing study tracking the health of more than 133,000 women, the team also will look at how use of aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs affect women’s breast cancer risk and survival.
Across the Pacific, Australian researchers announced findings on Tuesday hinting that aspirin also may interfere with cancer spread by keeping vessels in the lymphatic system from dilating.
If researchers confirm that aspirin prevents breast cancer and reduces breast cancer progression, they will have identified an inexpensive, accessible method to reduce breast cancer risk. Chen and his colleagues believe that such a discovery could provide particular benefits to women from underserved populations.
(The researchers are mum on whether they’ll ever tackle what an apple a day really does.)
Can stall tactics work best for multiple myeloma?
When an outright cure for a disease isn’t possible, medicine is going for the next best thing: keeping disease in a sort of suspended animation.
Amrita Krishnan
It’s worked for HIV, a disease in which powerful drugs taken every day suppress the virus in many who have it, like basketball legend Magic Johnson. And it’s how many people with chronic myelogenous leukemia, like Johnson’s former teammate Kareem Abdul Jabbar, survive for years after their diagnosis (the drug Gleevec can stifle the leukemia and make it manageable.) Now researchers are trying to make similar strides against multiple myeloma, an aggressive cancer with no known cure.
City of Hope researchers and their colleagues around the world are working on combinations of treatments that could help many patients live longer with the disease, a blood cancer that develops in the bone marrow.
So far, no one treatment seems to get rid of the cancerous cells in multiple myeloma completely. Even when signs of cancer have vanished, the cells usually return. But using a series of new treatments could both improve patients’ response and reduce side effects — potentially helping many patients keep their cancer at bay for years.
In multiple myeloma, doctors are testing combinations of drugs that boost the immune system to fight cancer together with other new drugs called proteasome inhibitors, which prompt cancer cells to kill themselves. Together they can knock down and suppress multiple myeloma. More recently, physicians started to use them after stem cell transplantation to keep cancer in check.
A variety of approaches are now reaching patients through clinical trials, and researchers have found ways to make some medications powerful enough to suppress cancer while being gentler on the patient.
“We see reasons for optimism,” says Amrita Krishnan, M.D., director of City of Hope’s Multiple Myeloma Program. One recent City of Hope study showed that a new drug combination given after transplantation seemed to knock out cancer cells more deeply in many patients, “which we hope will ultimately translate into better survival.”
Genetic test may point to best treatment for each patient’s early lung cancer
Thanks to advances in surgery and medicine, about 43 percent of men and women diagnosed with lung cancer today will still be alive a year after their diagnosis — significantly higher than the 1-year survival rate of 37 percent three decades ago.
Dan J. Raz
The 5-year survival rate, though, remains low at 16 percent. Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., and researchers like City of Hope’s Dan J. Raz, M.D., are looking for ways to change that. One of those ways may be by making sure that patients with early-stage lung cancer receive the treatment that’s most likely to eradicate their cancer.
Before recently joining City of Hope, Raz, assistant professor in the Division of Thoracic Surgery, was part of a University of California, San Francisco research team that developed a potential tool to customize treatment for early lung cancer patients. The tool is a genetic test that may predict which early-stage lung cancers are likely to be more aggressive and spread.
Says Raz:
“There are tens of thousands of patients with stage 1 lung cancer diagnosed every year in the U.S., and currently the standard of care for these patients is surgery alone. The goal of this assay is to better predict the risk of lung cancer recurrence and death among these patients so that physicians can use chemotherapy, surgery and even non-surgical treatment modalities in a more effective treatment plan.”
The American Cancer Society reports that more than half of patients reach the 5-year survival milestone when their lung cancers are diagnosed early before they metastasize and spread to other areas of the body. Only 15 percent of cancers are caught in this early stage.
An immunotherapy against breast cancer may be within sight
Peter P. Lee (Photo by Darrin S. Joy)
A City of Hope scientist believes that the immune system has the power to defend itself against breast cancer and conquer it. It just needs the right kind of help.
Peter P. Lee, M.D., advocates a holistic approach to immunotherapy. What does he mean by holistic? It’s a battle plan that takes advantage of all stages of the body’s defenses against disease.
These are the three stages, he explains:
- The first phase starts after foreign cells like bacteria enter the body, or cancer cells develop within it. Immune system cells called dendritic cells detect these unwanted cells and begin to signal a problem that activates the immune system’s response.
- In the second phase, immune cells called T cells start to multiply and spread. These cells mount a defense against the disease-causing cells. As long as the unwanted cells remain, the immune system continues to pump out more T cells.
- During the final phase, the T cells seek out and attack the foreign or cancer cells.
According to Lee, who recently joined City of Hope as professor and associate chair of the Department of Cancer Immunotherapeutics and Tumor Immunology, today’s immune-based cancer therapies don’t work as well as hoped because they concentrate only on one stage of immune response.
He’s tweaking different phases of the immune response to attack cancer in several ways, and he hopes to have a combination therapy ready within five years.
He has an appropriate sponsor for his multimillion-dollar immunotherapy work: the Department of Defense.
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