THE CANADIANS STRIKE AGAIN!

Staring into a late-summer Norwegian sun

That's a quilt store in the background

Toronto, is a big, important city.  Despite the facts that it is located across the border in the Great Frozen North, has a mayor who may or may not smoke crack cocaine, and is inhabited by people who pronounce “about” and “strength” in a peculiar way – it is highly civilized.   Lately faithful reader Parkfriend has alerted me to evidence that Toronto is in the forefront of a civilized pursuit of unsurpassed importance – cancer research.  In fact, in some fields it seems to be THE  forefront.  I refer to the Princess Margaret Cancer Center, out of which lately have come two stories of important advances in cancer therapy. 

The first reports the research of Dr. Suzanne Kamel-Reid who, with her colleagues Drs. Phillipe Bedard and Lillian Sui, has used gene-sequencing techniques to craft personalized drugs specific to an individual cancer.  As you all know full well, cancer is a very heterogeneous disease.  Within a specific gene – say a tumor suppressor – there may be many separate mutations.  Some cause aggressive cancer, whereas others make no difference at all.  Of two cancers of the ovary, one may be mutated in such a way as to grow rapidly and metastasize, whereas the other may be “indolent” – poke along so slowly that it almost can be ignored.  Thus, standard therapy protocols for ALL ovarian cancers may work well for some, but not at all for others.  Dr. Kamel-Reid’s group has begun to use their knowledge of HOW a particular gene is mutated to design personalized treatments.  How they do it is beyond our pay grade, but they have been reasonably successful.  Goodon’em.

Princess Margaret CC also is the home of Dr. Tak Mak.  Together with a colleague from UCLA, Dr. Dennis Slamon, Dr. Tak Mak has crafted a drug that inhibits the growth of a wide range of cancers – including ovarian.  That is, it does so in mice.  The researchers have now applied for FDA approval to test the drug – called CFI 400945 – on humans.  It works by targeting an enzyme, PLK4, that is important in cell division.  So, get to work, FDA.

By the way:  the drug so far has cost $40 million to produce.  Also, the FDA application ran to 4000 pages.  Heck, that’s almost as long as the U.S. Tax Code. 

Sort of a PS:   Somewhere in these two articles I ran on the statement that the two most promising lines of investigation in cancer research today are targeted therapies, and immune system-based therapies.   To these I would add epigenetic studies, especially those involving the role of miRNA – and early detection.  The latter may be of the greatest immediate importance.

Here are the links:

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/06/03/toronto_oncologists_present_groundbreaking_paper_on_future_of_cancer_treatment.html.

http://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2013/06/18/cancer_breakthrough_new_drug_to_prevent_cancer_growth.html