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AACR Provides Forum to Advance Cancer Knowledge
By Charlene Laino
WebMD Guest Blogger
April 23, 2009 (Denver) -- Of the dozens of medical meetings I attend for WebMD each year, one of my faves is that of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), which began Saturday and ended Wednesday.
For starters, the enthusiasm of the researchers themselves is downright refreshing, even addictive. Maybe it’s because they spend the rest of the year toiling away in labs, performing the same experiments over and over to be sure they can replicate the results. Or at their desks, trying to rewrite a grant for the 10th time to obtain ever-scarce government dollars to fund their research. Whatever their motivation, the end result is the same: They can’t wait to share their latest findings with the some 15,000 attendees, from their colleagues to the media.
More importantly, it’s where we first hear of those advances that get us a step closer to the holy grail of personalized medicine -- tailoring treatment to each individual based on his or her genetic makeup. It’s in the lab that researchers first come up with new ways to target cancer’s genetic roots.
My favorite experiment this year came from Boston University, where researchers are using gene therapy to re-educate patients’ own immune systems to attack prostate tumors in the body.
I mean, how cool is that. Although it will be years before those tests move from the bench to the bedside, other researchers are already using a personalized approach to therapy to extend the lives of people with advanced cancer who failed to benefit from standard drug treatments.
Genetic experiments often lead to the unexpected: Still other researchers found that dark-haired people who do not sunburn easily -- a group traditionally thought to be relatively immune to skin cancer -- may be at risk for potentially deadly skin cancer, too. Others found that wine may help protect women against non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, while still others reported that a couple of handfuls of walnuts a day may help keep breast cancer at bay -- at least if you’re a female mouse.
The walnut story, though, brings me to an important point. Not everything that works in the lab and in animals -- the very stuff that’s the core of AACR presentations -- will end up working in humans. So when the researcher concluded that people should heed recommendations to eat more walnuts, I wasn’t surprised that another doctor called her suggestion “outrageous.”
“You can’t make recommendations to humans based on a study in mice,” says Peter G. Shields, MD, deputy director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington, D.C. Case in point: beta carotene. Animal and some preliminary human studies suggested beta carotene supplements reduce lung cancer. But when they were put to the pivotal test, pitted against placebo in some 29,000 Finnish men, smokers given beta carotene actually got more lung cancer.
“A lot of things we hear at AACR will turn out to be just plain wrong. They’ll never see the light of day,” Shields says.
But that doesn’t make them unimportant. Discovery of what causes cancer and how to treat it is a process, and each year new technologies allow researchers to be that much smarter. “Ten years ago, we could only look at [genes] in 100 people. Now we can look at 100 million. And, now we can look not just at genes, but how they’re regulated,” Shields says.
But even then, “we can get the wrong answer,” he adds.
So back to the lab? Of course, but not right away. What one researcher halfway around the world is working on may provide crucial clues to help out another. And, that’s why the AACR meeting is so important. It provides a forum so researchers can step out of their isolated labs and share their ideas and advance their knowledge. Take the radical report from AACR 2007 suggesting that most current cancer treatments are aimed at eradicating the wrong cancer cells, for example.
This year, other researchers followed up on it, reporting that combination drug treatment slashed the number of pancreatic cancer stem cells in mice, curbing tumor growth.
The latest cure for cancer in mice might not -- it fact, probably will not – translate directly into a cure for human cancer. But it will get us that much closer to conquering the disease.
WebMD Guest Blogger
April 23, 2009 (Denver) -- Of the dozens of medical meetings I attend for WebMD each year, one of my faves is that of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), which began Saturday and ended Wednesday.
For starters, the enthusiasm of the researchers themselves is downright refreshing, even addictive. Maybe it’s because they spend the rest of the year toiling away in labs, performing the same experiments over and over to be sure they can replicate the results. Or at their desks, trying to rewrite a grant for the 10th time to obtain ever-scarce government dollars to fund their research. Whatever their motivation, the end result is the same: They can’t wait to share their latest findings with the some 15,000 attendees, from their colleagues to the media.
More importantly, it’s where we first hear of those advances that get us a step closer to the holy grail of personalized medicine -- tailoring treatment to each individual based on his or her genetic makeup. It’s in the lab that researchers first come up with new ways to target cancer’s genetic roots.
My favorite experiment this year came from Boston University, where researchers are using gene therapy to re-educate patients’ own immune systems to attack prostate tumors in the body.
I mean, how cool is that. Although it will be years before those tests move from the bench to the bedside, other researchers are already using a personalized approach to therapy to extend the lives of people with advanced cancer who failed to benefit from standard drug treatments.
Genetic experiments often lead to the unexpected: Still other researchers found that dark-haired people who do not sunburn easily -- a group traditionally thought to be relatively immune to skin cancer -- may be at risk for potentially deadly skin cancer, too. Others found that wine may help protect women against non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, while still others reported that a couple of handfuls of walnuts a day may help keep breast cancer at bay -- at least if you’re a female mouse.
The walnut story, though, brings me to an important point. Not everything that works in the lab and in animals -- the very stuff that’s the core of AACR presentations -- will end up working in humans. So when the researcher concluded that people should heed recommendations to eat more walnuts, I wasn’t surprised that another doctor called her suggestion “outrageous.”
“You can’t make recommendations to humans based on a study in mice,” says Peter G. Shields, MD, deputy director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington, D.C. Case in point: beta carotene. Animal and some preliminary human studies suggested beta carotene supplements reduce lung cancer. But when they were put to the pivotal test, pitted against placebo in some 29,000 Finnish men, smokers given beta carotene actually got more lung cancer.
“A lot of things we hear at AACR will turn out to be just plain wrong. They’ll never see the light of day,” Shields says.
But that doesn’t make them unimportant. Discovery of what causes cancer and how to treat it is a process, and each year new technologies allow researchers to be that much smarter. “Ten years ago, we could only look at [genes] in 100 people. Now we can look at 100 million. And, now we can look not just at genes, but how they’re regulated,” Shields says.
But even then, “we can get the wrong answer,” he adds.
So back to the lab? Of course, but not right away. What one researcher halfway around the world is working on may provide crucial clues to help out another. And, that’s why the AACR meeting is so important. It provides a forum so researchers can step out of their isolated labs and share their ideas and advance their knowledge. Take the radical report from AACR 2007 suggesting that most current cancer treatments are aimed at eradicating the wrong cancer cells, for example.
This year, other researchers followed up on it, reporting that combination drug treatment slashed the number of pancreatic cancer stem cells in mice, curbing tumor growth.
The latest cure for cancer in mice might not -- it fact, probably will not – translate directly into a cure for human cancer. But it will get us that much closer to conquering the disease.
Labels: AACR, American Association of Cancer Research, cancer research
