Work on finding new and more effective ways to treat and defeat cancer is never ending. It is an honorable battle fought by scientists and the people suffering from the disease. A multidisciplinary team of scientists and researchers have published the findings, after years of research, of their search to stop the movement of cancer cells. Raymond Bergan, M.D., division chief of hermatology and medical oncology and professor of medicine at OHSU explained his team’s unique approach. Dr. Bergan explains that while most cancer research teams are looking to kill or destroy cancer, his team wanted to do their part by taking away the disease’s mobility.
"For the vast majority of cancer--breast, prostate, lung, colon, and others--if it is detected early when it is a little lump in that organ and it has not spread, you will live. And generally, if you find it late, after it has spread throughout your body, you will die," says Bergan, also the associate director of medical oncology in the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute and director of the OHSU Bergan Basic Research Laboratory. "Movement is key: the difference is black and white, night and day. If cancer cells spread throughout your body, they will take your life. We can treat it, but it will take your life."
Dr. Bergan’s team worked with chemists, and worked backward. They started with a singular chemical that would just stop all cancer cells from moving and from there they “refined that chemical until it did a perfect job of stopping the cells with no side effects.” And while there are no drugs without side effects, the hope for this team of scientists was to find one that interacted almost exclusively on cancer cells. The work was hard to fund, say researchers, since it wasn’t a “cure.” But the results have been exciting, and the next step is testing it on human subjects.
"Our eventual goal is to be able to say to a woman with breast cancer: here, take this pill and your cancer won't spread throughout your body. The same thing for patients with prostate, lung, and colon cancer," Bergan says. "This drug is highly effective against four cancer types (breast, colon, lung, prostate) in the in vitro model so far. Our goal is to move this forward as a therapy to test in humans."
Godspeed.