IU Cancer Researcher Receives Grant
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowINDIANAPOLIS - Research into a drug that could potentially make radiation therapy more effective for cancer patients is the subject of a grant from the National Cancer Institute to IU researcher John Turchi. He was awarded a five-year $2.9 million grant to study the DNA-dependent protein kinase.
Turchi says kinase is involved in repairing DNA double-strand breaks, and when a cancer patient is undergoing radiation treatments, the radiation purposely causes the DNA breaks to kill the cancer cells.
“In the case of radiation therapy, the repair of those breaks is a bad thing,” Turchi said. “It allows the cancer cells to continue to divide. Being able to block that repair pathway through inhibitors of the DNA-PK protein allows us to increase the efficacy of radiation therapy.”
Turchi’s research focuses on solid tumors receiving radiation treatment, with lung cancer as the main component. He says the radiation would still be given along with the therapeutic.
“In addition to lung cancer, esophageal and head and neck cancers could also benefit. Radiation therapy is a mainstay for these cancers and, we think we can increase the therapeutic benefit of radiation with our drug,” said Turchi.
Turchi says there are investigational drugs being used, but his therapeutic uses a different way to act in the body that could expand options for patents who don’t respond to existing medications or whose cancer has become resistant.
“Our molecule does something completely different,” Turchi said. “There are reasons to believe that our inhibitor allows a greater scope of possibilities for cancers than what is currently being tested in the clinic. Because of this different mechanism of action, it opens up a whole array of things that aren’t possible with the existing therapeutics.”
Turchi adds that he and colleagues are also exploring how the molecule could work on ovarian cancer with certain genetic predispositions, in which he says the cancer is more defenseless against the drug and could work without radiation.