Celebrating National Cancer Research Month with a cancer stem cell round-up

In celebration of National Cancer Research Month, our colleagues at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute have posted a series of blog entries about cancer research at their institute. The latest installment includes CIRM grantee Robert Wechsler-Reya, who moved to California from Duke University on a CIRM Research Leadership Award.

According to their blog:

Dr. Robert Wechsler-Reya, who directs the Tumor Development Program in Sanford-Burnham’s Cancer Center, has spent many years studying how “good” processes can also cause disease. He is particularly interested in how mechanisms that are normal in embryonic development can cause cancer when turned on in children and adults.

“We work on the relationship between development and cancer, particularly in the brain,” says Dr. Wechsler-Reya. “We’re interested in how normal stem cells and progenitor cells make decisions like when to divide, when to differentiate and what to differentiate into. We’re interested in how those decisions go wrong in cancer.”

To-date, CIRM has awarded more than $130 million to cancer research, including grantees working to understand the role of cancer stem cells in the disease and other teams working to develop therapies. Among our Disease Team projects, which have the goal of reaching clinical trials by 2014, CIRM funded two teams working on therapies for glioma (City of Hope and UCSF), two working on therapies for leukemia (Stanford and UCSD), and one working on solid tumors (UCLA).

Here are a few resources CIRM offers for people trying to get information about stem cells and cancer.

• Information about stem cells and glioma
• Information about stem cells and leukemia
• Information about stem cells and solid tumors

We also produced this video with CIRM grantee Catriona Jamieson at Moore's UCSD Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego. Jamieson has a therapy in clinical trial for a pre-cancerous blood condition. The work that led to that trial was funded in part by a CIRM SEED grant.



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Stem cells deliver anti-cancer therapy to treat glioma

Looks like the FDA agrees with our choice of grantees. They’ve approved a clinical trial based on work led by Karen Aboody (shown in photo) at City of Hope using neural stem cells to target and kill high-grade gliomas. She’s the leader of a CIRM disease team that we funded to develop a second generation version of this therapy.

The clinical trial will test a genetically altered human neural stem cell line with a known tendency to migrate toward tumors. Those cells contain an enzyme, which accumulates where those stem cells congregate in the neighborhood of the tumor. When the patient is given a relatively harmless chemical called 5-FC, the enzyme converts it to an active chemotherapy agent just at the location of the tumor.

In a press release, the City of Hope quotes Karen Aboody as saying:

"Using neural stem cells as delivery vehicles for therapy may allow us to target concentrated therapeutics specifically to tumor sites while reducing the undesirable side effects of current chemotherapy regimens, including toxicity to normally dividing bone marrow, gastrointestinal tract, skin and hair cells."

Bettina Steffen, M.D., who leads CIRM’s disease team program, says Aboody’s disease team project uses the same cell line that’s also used in the trial that just got FDA approval. That means when she’s ready to go to the FDA for her disease team work, there will be prior experience with the cell line. “Hitting all the hurdles to get the cell line approved is actually a huge deal, as this facilitates her path to the clinic with the CIRM-funded disease team program,“ Steffen says.

You can read more about stem cell approaches to treating glioma on CIRM's glioma facts page.

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