Mapping a Grant
Ethan Dmitrovsky, M.D.
For late-stage lung cancer patients whose disease has stopped responding to treatment, the average survival is four months or less. But a combination drug therapy identified by Waxman-funded investigators may be able to extend survival in this group of patients, according to their study published in the June 2011 issue of Cancer Prevention Research.
A New Way to Treat Lung Cancer
The scientists found that a combination of two drugs that are already FDA approved and on the market, bexarotene and erlotinib, was able to reach a specific subset of patients who are resistant to treatment due to the presence of a mutation in their cancer known as KRAS.
Overall 20 percent to 25 percent of all lung cancers have KRAS mutations, which are found in smokers. But KRAS mutations are more common in a type of lung cancer known as adenocarcinomas—which are the most common type of all lung cancers, and are also found in never smokers who develop lung cancer.
When the two drugs were offered to patients, the median survival was five and a half months and longer. In some subsets of patients, the survival increased to six months or longer. Three patients from the clinical trial are now living two to four years beyond the expected average.
"This might be a new way to treat KRAS mutant forms of lung cancers," said Ethan Dmitrovsky, M.D., an Associate Scientific Director of the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation who worked on the research. "This area is an unmet medical need in oncology. These are often times the most difficult lung cancers to treat."
What does this mean for patients?
"This work that was done at the bench was translated into the clinic and provides a way to use this regimen in future personalized cancer medicine," said Dmitrovsky. "That is, to target those patients whose lung cancers harbor KRAS mutations."
Supporting Translational Research
This new understanding of a difficult-to-treat lung cancer has been more than 10 years in the making for Dmitrovsky and his lab.
"Our work at first was too speculative to have been funded by the NIH," said Dmitrovsky. "I eventually captured an NIH grant after three positive clinical trials and other translational research. But without the Foundation's initial grant, this clinical work would not have been possible. The Waxman Foundation fills an important niche in this type of translational research."
The scientists are now taking the new drug regimen a step further to target a critical cell cycle regulator that drives lung cancer growth, even in cases with KRAS mutations in their tumors. The results of their efforts have recently been duplicated by a group of scientists at MD Anderson Cancer Center.
"We are in a time of personalized cancer treatment based on the genetic mistakes found in the individual's cancer," said Samuel Waxman, M.D., the Founder and Scientific Director of the Waxman Foundation. "Ethan's work shows how this applies to a more successful treatment outcome in a poor prognosis lung cancer."
*This article is an abridged version of the article which appeared in the Spring 2011 Waxman Report newsletter.
