Chemical inhibitor could lead to new nontoxic chemotherapy treatment
Breast cancer survival rates have increased steadily over the last decade. As quoted by the American Cancer Society, on average, a stunning 100 percent of patients with stage I breast cancer survive for at least five years after diagnosis. However, this average survival rate falls to 72 percent for those with stage III and 22 percent for those diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer.
From these statistics, it is obvious that new methods of treatment are desperately needed to help increase survival rates of late-stage cancer patients. What is not readily apparent is the suffering experienced those who undergo widely used cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiation.
Unfortunately, for many cancer types, including breast cancer, cytotoxic treatments are considered the best line of defense or are the only option available.
Two Eberly College of Science faculty researchers, Dr. Yanming Wang and Dr. Gong Chen, seek to change this bleak reality for the over 1.6 million Americans diagnosed with cancer last year. Chen and Wang developed novel intellectual property that includes a small molecule therapeutic that allows the body to fight cancer naturally. This exciting intellectual property is protected under an issued U.S. Patent, granted to the Penn State Research Foundation on behalf of the inventors.
What if our body had a natural switch, that when flipped, could help reverse cancer tumor growth?
“This switch exists,” says Wang, who has been studying the PAD4 enzyme for over eight years. While the Wang lab has discovered how PAD4 can help the body fight bacterial infection, they have also found this enzyme to be commonly overexpressed in cancerous tissue. When they studied it further, Wang and his colleagues discovered that overabundance of PAD4 results in the silencing of tumor-suppressor genes, the body’s natural defense against cancerous cell growth.
In collaboration with Department of Chemistry faculty member Gong Chen, Wang developed a new small molecule chemical inhibitor to limit the activity of the PAD4 enzyme. When this inhibitor was tested in mouse models, the team discovered it to be very successful in reversing tumor growth. In fact, the PAD4 inhibitor reduced tumor size just as effectively as the most common chemotherapy drug with a 70 percent tumor shrinkage rate. But unlike this chemotherapy treatment, the PAD4 inhibitor did not alter normal (noncancerous) cell development and function.
Based on these exciting results, Chen and Wang think that the PAD4 inhibitor may represent a new potentially nontoxic chemotherapy treatment that helps the body to fight cancer naturally. They are currently working to raise the funding needed in order to move the small molecule inhibitor into FDA-recognized clinical trials.