Published:
Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 6:32 p.m.
Two
and a half years ago, the University of Florida College of Medicine recruited
Dr. Duane Mitchell and his lab team away from Duke University to build up a UF
program on brain tumor research.
Since
then, Mitchell and his team at the UF Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain
Tumor Therapy have made steady progress in the lab and in clinical trials on
using the human immune system to attack tumors in children and adults.
They
launched the first UF clinical trial to use immunotherapy on children with
brain tumors and have attracted an infusion of research dollars to work on
developing new treatments.
Last
week, Mitchell and his team received another significant funding boost — a $1
million grant from the Hyundai Hope on Wheels Foundation to conduct a four-year
research project intended to lead to an improved, more effective immunotherapy
treatment for pediatric brain tumors.
“Pediatric
brain tumors are a significant problem and are one of the leading causes of
death in children related to cancer,” Mitchell said during an interview last
week at his office and lab inside the Evelyn F. & William L. McKnight Brain
Institute. “For many children diagnosed with malignant brain tumors, standard
treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy are not always effective
at eradicating the disease. The immune system has at least the potential to
identify tumor cells specifically and lead to their targeted elimination from
our body.”
The
American Cancer Society describes immunotherapy as a “treatment that uses
certain parts of a person’s immune system to fight diseases such as cancer.”
The treatments may stimulate the immune system “to work harder or smarter to
attack cancer cells” or give the “immune system components, such as man-made
immune system proteins” to battle cancer, the American Cancer Society wrote.
In
the last several years, the field has grown in clinical trials and patient
treatment.
“I
would definitely say we have seen an explosion, some say a revolution, and I
don't think that’s an overstatement, in the last five to seven years,” said Dr.
Crystal Mackall, associate director of the Stanford University Cancer Institute
and an expert in immunotherapy.
She
said a potential advantage of the treatment lies in the fact that when the
immune system successfully fights off an infection, the body often builds up a
long-time protection against that infection. If that carries over to cancer
treatments, immunotherapy could provide additional protection against
recurrence than other forms of treatment, Mackall said.
She
said right now immunotherapy is best known for treating melanoma, the most
aggressive form of skin cancer, but there has also been successes with lung
cancer, leukemia, lymphoma and breast cancer.
“We
are all waiting on a breakthrough for brain tumors and that has yet to happen,”
MacKall said.
Mitchell
and his team of researchers at UF are one group striving for that breakthrough.
Their work will focus on one of the most common malignant brain tumors in
children, medulloblastoma.
Mitchell
said the researchers will take immune cells from a patient and stimulate them
in an effort to have them “recognize” the patient's cancer cells as foreign and
attack them. Because cancer cells are partially normal cells, they are often
able to “hide out” from the immune system, Mitchell said. He said that’s a
challenge to immunotherapy that researchers are trying to overcome.
The
UF research will also work to identify good “targets” in brain tumors for the
immune system to attack. That will include comparing the proteins in brain
tumors to those present in normal brain tissue and studying the changes or
mutations in those brain tumor proteins.
Mitchell
said the research will “allow us to bring our next generation of immunotherapy”
into clinical trials on treatment of childhood brain tumors.
Mitchell
was one of four researchers in the country to win a Hyundai Hope on Wheels
Quantum research grant.
In
a press release, Hyundai Hope on Wheels officials said that, “while childhood
cancer survival rates have jumped from 10 percent 50 years ago to 90 percent
today, the final stretch to ending the disease will be the most difficult,
evidenced by slow progress in the last 10 years. The four Quantum recipients
have been identified as having the highest potential of breaking through and bringing
us closer to a world without pediatric cancer.”
Mitchell
and the other researchers accepted their grants last Thursday evening during a
ceremony in New York City.
