With an estimated 1.7 million cancer diagnoses expected this year, foundations like the SWCRF need to invest in research that seeks out novel approaches to the causes of and treatments for cancer.  A hallmark of SWCRF is our effort to identify both groundbreaking research programs and gifted cancer research investigators and then fund them.

Areas of research that caught our eye more than 20 years ago were tumor dormancy and metastasis, which was an unpopular theory at the time. Our investment has paid off with breakthroughs in both understanding tumor dormancy and metastasis that has now been replicated and validated by researchers worldwide.

This research explored what makes tumors remain dormant and then “wake up” and research that examined how and why cancer cells spread from the original tumor site to other areas of the body (metastasis).

As part of the SWCRF Institute Without Walls program on the prevention of metastasis, Dr. Julio Aguirre-Ghiso had been collaborating with Emily Bernstein at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Jayanta Debnath, M.D. at the University of California, San Francisco.

Now, Dr. Aguirre-Ghiso and his lab are currently undertaking a clinical trial that has identified FDA-approved drugs that have been repurposed to keep disseminated cancer cells dormant.

This promising trial is focusing on patients who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer and who are undergoing hormone therapy. The drugs appear to reprogram the cancer cells, forcing them to remember cures that tell them to remain dormant and as a result, stop spreading.

Another study uses breast cancer cell samples to provide oncologists with a biomarker to determine if patients have dormant cancer cells hiding in their bone marrow. The findings may help predict whether an individual patient’s residual cancer cells would remain dormant for a long time or undergo rapid metastasis.

“We have used funds from the SWCRF to explore projects that are seen as high-risk, and these projects have yielded very important information,” said Dr. Aguirre-Ghiso.