Conversant as well as some of our fellow HudsonAlpha researchers and associate companies received some great press from the Huntsville Times for breast cancer awareness week.
HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology wages quiet, personal war on breast cancer
By Patricia C. McCarter
October 04, 2009, 9:44AM
Inside the building situated in a former cotton field, there’s a war going on.
In multiple offices along the high-ceiling corridors of the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, nonprofit research groups and private companies are waging serious battle against breast cancer.
Some are embroiled in research to help them understand which proteins cancer cells are drawn to. Others are developing tests that will predict whether a particular breast cancer will likely reoccur, so that a woman and her doctor can select the best course of therapy.
Still others are seeking an actual cure, as well as other drugs that can help make the grueling task of fighting breast cancer a little less awful.
And for so many of these bright minds, the battle against breast cancer is more than a little bit personal.
Applied Genomics Inc.
Rob Seitz was a high school senior when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She got well, then sick, well, then sick again, and she died when he was 28.
He and Doug Ross founded Applied Genomics in 2000, with the goal of subtyping breast cancers so that oncologists could determine which chemotherapy worked best for each patient. In 2007, Mammastrat was ready for the market.
“It predicts recurrence in (estrogen responsive) positive, node negative breast cancer,” Seitz said. “As breast cancer goes, that’s the one you’d rather have.”
Mammastrat was developed by looking at thousands of breast cancer samples and determining which proteins correlated with negative outcomes. Samples came from Huntsville, Cleveland, Vancouver, Australia, Norway and elsewhere around the world.
If the test says “yes,” the oncologist can ramp up the chemotherapy process.
“You don’t want to have to get extra chemo if you don’t need it,” Seitz said. “It’s very difficult on the body.”
Seitz, who also has a master’s degree in divinity, and Ross are also working on a test called Mammotax, which will predict if a patient will respond to chemotherapies known as Taxotere and Taxol. Those are often added to “regular” chemotherapy, Seitz said, even though they’re only helpful if a patient expresses a particular protein.
“Ninety percent of breast cancer patients are getting this additional chemo, but not all of them need it,” he said. “Knowing you don’t need it can be very helpful.”
Mammastrat impacts about 43 percent of women with breast cancer, he said. But Mammotax will be able to impact the treatment of almost every breast cancer patient.
It is going through final clinical evaluation now and should be market ready within a year, he said. It will also be useful in the diagnosis of lung cancer patients.
“My mom is why I do this,” he said. “I know I will make a difference in this disease, and that is very important to me.”
Conversant
All the brilliant medical minds in the world couldn’t develop life-saving breast cancer treatments or tests if they didn’t initially have blood, tissue and tumor samples from afflicted patients.
That’s where companies such as Conversant come in. Founded nearly three years ago by Marshall Schreeder Jr. and Luke Doiron, Conversant gets permission from patients to collect their medical waste and turn it into samples for researchers.
Almost always, they say yes.
“Even though we tell them that this won’t improve their current treatment, that it might takes years for the research to yield something applicable to future cancer patients, they say yes,” Schreeder said.
It doesn’t alter their treatment course, and it doesn’t mean more needle sticks, “which are the two things they always ask about.”
In its lab space at HudsonAlpha, Conversant isolates cell types and puts those samples on slides and in tubes in preparation for researchers. The patients’ names are replaced with a series of numbers and letters, through which Conversant maintains updated files on how they’re responding to certain treatments.
All of that is pertinent for scientists trying to find better ways of treating the disease.
“The National Cancer Institute says getting good samples is the No. 1 impediment to cancer research,” Schreeder said. “It’s raw material for researchers around the world.”
Many of the samples are procured from Clearview Cancer Institute, where Schreeder’s namesake is one of the city’s premier oncologists. Doiron’s father is a physician in Knoxville, and other samples come from a hospital there.
“We are sensitive to not approach patients on the first visit to their physicians,” he said. “But we do have to talk to them before their first treatments.”
Currently, there are no blood tests to determine if a patient has breast cancer. In his best dream, such a test is developed using samples from Conversant.
“This isn’t an immediate-gratification kind of thing,” he said. “Researchers have to make a discovery, validate it, test, test, test, do animal trials, human trials, validate some more,” he said. “It’s a long-term fight.”
HudsonAlpha researchers
If you know why a disease has attacked your body, you can treat it more effectively than if you don’t.
Looking at all of the genes of 100 breast cancer patients, HudsonAlpha post-doctoral fellow K-T Varley hopes to one day determine why those 100 women got sick.
“New technologies allow us to look at all of a person’s genes at one time, so it’s not as daunting as was even just a few years ago,” said Varley, whose mother died of breast cancer.
She’s teamed up with researchers and oncologists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to look at how women respond to treatment and determine why some get better and others do not.
Genomic markers should show how aggressive the cancer is and lead doctors to a better understanding of which patients need what drugs. Some drugs impede a blood vessel’s ability to form and deliver nutrients to the tumor, but it impacts other parts of the body as well.
Others try to trick estrogen-receptive cancer cells into binding to a substance that mimics estrogen, but won’t give the cancer what it needs to reproduce.
“Currently, there’s a terrible time problem as well as horrible side effects in how cancer is treated,” said Dr. Rick Myers, president and director of HudsonAlpha. “So much of the time, doctors just don’t know which kind of chemo a patient is going to respond to best.
“So, they’ll be on one medicine for months, and when the doctors realize that one isn’t working, they have to switch to another. You can literally lose months using the wrong treatment because, currently, you just don’t always know.”
Myers said the word “cancer” actually refers to “a thousand different diseases” in which cells mutate and replicate. There will never be “one magic bullet” to take out all cancer because the disease isn’t just one thing.
“The dream is for there to be one annual blood test that can check for all sorts of tumors,” Varley said.
To which Myers added, “We’re not there yet, but we’re seeing how to design the pathway to get us there.”
Serina Therapeutics
It’s not just the medicine that matters. It’s also how the medicine is delivered to your body that determines how well the drug will work.
Serina Therapeutics was founded in 2006 by scientists who have already made their mark in drug efficacy, through the companies Shearwater Polymers and Nektar, by developing polyethylene glycol (PEG) technology. PEG allows certain pain medicines to be absorbed in the gut and then block pain receptors in the brain without causing bowel dysfunction.
Chemist Mike Bentley, 70, sparked the idea behind NKTR-118 and NKTR-119, developed when he was at Nektar, and now being late-stage tested and marketed by AstraZeneca.
He said the drugs will benefit breast cancer patients, as well as other patients who take opioids such as Hydrocodone and morphine for pain. With NKTR-118 and 119, patients will see the benefits of the pain inhibitor without suffering from constipation, which 40 to 90 percent of opioid users do.
“People like to make jokes about constipation, but it can be a serious, costly problem,” he said. “You’re not allowed to leave the hospital after surgery until you’ve had a bowel movement, but the opioids keep you from being able to go.
“So, you have to stay in the hospital longer, and you’re just feeling worse and worse. A drug that lets you leave the hospital sooner can save a ton of money.”
Bentley, an Alabama native who spent a couple decades teaching chemistry at the University of Maine, said the idea came to him almost 10 years ago. It involved using polymers to encourage proteins to circulate longer in the body and continue the “rippling effect” in the gut that allows for proper body function.
“I do the ‘thought chemistry,’ ” said the Serina Therapeutic cofounder. “And I oversaw the team as it was being developed. I’ve never had more fun on a project, and I know it’s going to improve lives.
“I don’t even take a salary now. I’m just here because it’s fun.”
