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HealtHy life: CanCer
August 29-30, 2012
Targeting cancer at the Knight Cancer
Institute
■
Researchers at Portland-area institue make great stride in cancer treatments
By SAUNDRA SORENSON
Pamplin Media Group
It’s a mixed blessing: If you live in the
Portland metro area, you happen to be
situated very close to cutting-edge cancer
treatment research — should you need it.
At the Oregon Health & Science University
(OHSU) Knight Cancer Institute, researchers
are taking steps to make cancer treatments a
more exact science through an approach
known as targeted cancer therapies, some-
times referred to as “personalized cancer
medicine” or “precision medicine.”
Dr. Christopher Corless, chief medical offi-
cer of Knight Diagnostic Laboratories, is
straightforward in his definition.
“Using pills or drugs, we go after a very
specific mutation or alteration that is making
a tumor grow,” he said. “These mutations are
like having a gas pedal stuck on a car, and
these drugs come in and unwedge.”
He adds that initial studies have shown
that personalized cancer medicine can have
higher success rates than chemotherapy —
and without the toxic side effects. He com-
pares the traditional path of chemotherapy to
“carpet-bombing,” while “the new approach
is more of a smart bomb approach,” he says.
The Knight Cancer Institute is under the
direction of Dr. Brian Druker, an oncologist
who has been with OHSU for 19 years. He be-
gan with a focus on leukemia research, pro-
pelled by the theory that focusing on the cel-
lular processes that led to tumor growth
would allow him to isolate harmful cancerous
cells while sparing healthy ones. In 1998, he
began clinical trials on the drug Gleevec,
which has been shown to successfully battle
chronic myloid leukemia on a molecular lev-
el. The drug, he says, allowed many leukemia
sufferers to return home from hospice care.
Gleevec has since been approved by the FDA.
A study cited by the National Institute of
Health confirms that at 18 months of follow-
up, “92 percent of patients on Gleevec had no
progression of disease, compared with 73.5
percent of patients on conventional therapy”
and that 85 percent of patients on Gleevec
showed a significant decrease in number of
cancer cells, compared with 22 percent of pa-
tients on conventional therapy.
“We’re projecting that most patients
should have a normal life expectancy,” said
Druker, although the Knight Institute does
not yet have the data to back this claim. “That
is perhaps the most dramatic result we’ve
seen with the targeted therapy.”
It was Gleevec’s success, Druker believes,
that provided “proof of concept” for the per-
sonalized medicine approach, which by his
estimate is only about a decade old.
An NIH project called the Cancer Genome
Atlas was founded in order to sequence the
molecular processes of cancers. According to
NIH, this five-year initiative will focus on
more than 20 cancers — specifically those
with “poor prognosis and overall public
health impact.” Among the cancers targeted
in the study are breast cancer, colon cancer
and melanoma.
Druker views OHSU’s Knight Institute as a
pioneering force in the genome-mapping
project.
“We’re well known for our contributions to
targeted therapy,” he said. “We’ve taken that
platform and leadership and really want to
develop a similar strategy for every cancer.
We need a full and complete understanding
of what drives the cancer, and we need to be
able to match patients with the right drug to
battle those abnormalities.”
As Corless views it, “Our job here in the
laboratories is to go and find the targets that
are out there in different kinds of cancers.
There’s a long list, and there are literally
hundreds of drugs in clinical development
against these cancers.”
Not all of the drug trials have been as
promising, however. Although the melanoma
drug Vemurafenib yielded some dramatic re-
sponses, Druker said, the benefits were found
to last only six months to a year. There were
similar setbacks for drugs used to target lung
cancer.
“So you can look at that and be really dis-
appointed,” Druker said. “The way I look at it
is, we need to move to combination therapy. If
PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP FILE PHOTO
Dr. Brian Druker, an oncologist with OHSU for 19
years, directs the Knight Cancer Institute.
CONTINUED / Page 13
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