Research teams pursue novel solutions for lung cancer

Waking sleeping giants

Mark Grinstaff: Professor of Chemistry at the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the College of Engineering

In aggressive cancers such as mesothelioma, drug resistance leads to treatment failure and bleak survival rates for about 85 percent of patients.

But not for long, if Mark Grinstaff has anything to do with it.

Grinstaff, a professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering, was awarded a National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute grant to study the development of a combination therapy that would tackle drug resistance in cancer.

In Grinstaff’s sights: mesothelioma, a rare and extremely lethal cancer that afflicts about 3,000 people in the United States annually, according to the American Lung Association. Five-year survival rates for patients are dismal at less than 15 percent. The $2.7 million grant means a multidisciplinary team of researchers and physicians will work on an innovative therapy that uses an epigenetic modifying agent—affecting how cells read genes—in combination with traditional chemotherapeutic agents to treat mesothelioma. In other words, Grinstaff plans to wake dormant tumor-suppressor genes.

“We have an exciting opportunity to discover a new mechanism for killing cancer cells, and to apply our findings to real challenges in the clinic.”

The five-year grant brings together teams of researchers at Boston University, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Augusta University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Mycosynthetix, Inc. Working across boundaries is nothing new for Grinstaff. For almost 15 years, his Grinstaff Group, a lab with more than 20 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, has been combining members’ expertise in chemistry, pharmacology, and biomedical and mechanical engineering to tackle complicated medical challenges.

“We have an exciting opportunity to discover a new mechanism for killing cancer cells,” Grinstaff says, “and to apply our findings to real challenges in the clinic.”

BU and Johnson & Johnson represent new model of partnership

No fences make good researchers

Lung cancer is a grim story. More people die annually from the disease than from colon, breast, and prostate cancers combined. The five-year survival rate is 17.8 percent.

As part of a research alliance with BU, Johnson & Johnson Innovation will open a center on the Medical Campus devoted to the early detection of lung cancer and the development of therapeutics.

But Boston University researchers are poised to rewrite the narrative. In what promises to be a new model of collaboration, BU has launched a five-year research alliance with Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC (JJI) aimed at preventing, intercepting, and curing lung cancer.

A new JJI-funded research center on the Medical Campus will be ground zero, erasing the gap between academia and industry. There, BU scientists will work closely with members of the Lung Cancer Initiative within Johnson & Johnson to develop biomarker-based early-screening tests, as well as therapeutics to arrest or eradicate the disease in its earliest stages.

“Lung cancer is a horrible disease because it’s almost always diagnosed too late,” says Avrum Spira (ENG’02), a professor of medicine, pathology, and bioinformatics, and a pioneer in the genomics and early detection of lung cancer, who will direct the new center. For several years Spira has been consulting on lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) research with Janssen Research & Development, the pharmaceuticals arm of Johnson & Johnson, and he has joined JJI as global head of the Lung Cancer Initiative within J&J, which will be based at the new center at BU.

“We don’t want to be focused on late-stage disease, where research is mostly focused today,” Spira says. “We want to prevent disease from happening in the first place, and, among those patients who are already incubating disease, intercept the predisease process to block the development of full-blown advanced disease. That’s the primary focus of the new center, of my lab, of J&J.”