Choking Off Cancer

Part two of a three-part Ignition Award series

Two School of Medicine professors are working on a new way to help kill cancer. Their target: a recently discovered player in tumor blood vessel growth.

The idea behind their research, known as anti-angiogenesis, is that blocking the steps that cancer cells use to grow new blood vessel networks could choke off the supply of oxygen and nutrients that cancer needs to survive, grow, and spread. The research is being conducted by Victoria L. M. Herrera and Nelson Ruiz-Opazo, both MED professors of molecular medicine.

Anti-angiogenesis research was pioneered in the 1970s by Judah Folkman, currently the director of the vascular biology program at Children’s Hospital Boston. But Herrera notes that current anti-angiogenesis drugs, which largely focus on inhibiting a blood-vessel stimulator known as VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor), have failed to live up to their promise, sometimes slowing or stopping tumor growth and improving patient survival, but not always.

“The thought is that either patients develop resistance, or more likely, that there are other critical angiogenesis players,” says Herrera. She and Ruiz-Opazo have been investigating another pathway besides VEGF that contributes to blood vessel growth, known as DEAR (dual endothelin-1 angiotensin II receptor).

“If VEGF starts the laying of the new blood vessels, or main roads, DEAR works to add the branches, or side roads, and helps complete the network of new blood vessels,” Ruiz-Opazo explains. He and Herrera have had promising results inhibiting DEAR in mice and rats, reducing tumor blood vessel formation and inhibiting tumor growth.

The research has earned Herrera and Ruiz-Opazo an Ignition Award from BU’s Office of Technology Development (OTD). Four times a year, with the help of a committee of senior venture capitalists from the Boston area, OTD selects Ignition Award winners from applications submitted by BU professors or students whose research is ready to take the leap from the research laboratory to more commercial development. The work of Herrera and Ruiz-Opazo was one of three projects awarded a total of $100,000 at the end of last summer. Another round of Ignition winners will be announced this month, and the next application deadline is April 1.

“We believe these technologies have the potential to provide important benefits to society by translating into commercially available technologies, products, or treatments,” says Stanford Willie, executive director of OTD.

Herrera and Ruiz-Opazo plan to test anti-DEAR therapy in human cancer cell lines. They note that anti-DEAR therapy combined with anti-VEGF therapy could increase the effectiveness of both strategies. “A combination of anti-angiogenesis therapies is the likely scenario for improved success against cancer,” says Herrera.

Click here for part one of the Ignition Award series.

Chris Berdik can be reached at cberdik@bu.edu.