NIH Clinical Center Open to Collaboration

Under a new federal program, 10 research projects, including a few directly related to cancer, will receive $500,000 a year for at least 3 years and will give academic researchers access to the resources of the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD.

Researchers both inside and outside of government think the collaborations are a good idea.

“At a time when healthcare dollars are scarce, at a time when budgets are tight across the board, any opportunities to offer additional funding mechanisms to physician scientists are welcome,” says Peter Pinto, MD, a senior surgeon and principal investigator in the Urologic Oncology Branch of the NCI.

Pinto and his NCI research colleagues will collaborate with a team led by Arul Chinnaiyan, MD, PhD, a urologist and professor of pathology and urology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, to combine advanced MRI and metabolic imaging with genomic sequencing to improve prostate cancer diagnoses and treatment.

In the first round of research, they plan to scan 60 patients scheduled for prostate surgery at the NIH Clinical Center and then ship tissue samples to the University of Michigan for genetic analysis, including whole-exome sequencing and RNA transcriptome sequencing, looking for both DNA and RNA mutations.

“It'll be a first-of-its-kind study, linking advanced molecular and metabolic imaging with comprehensive molecular, next-generation sequencing,” says Chinnaiyan.

The goal is to understand how genetics might be driving what scientists see in their images, he explains, and ultimately to find a signature for the 20% to 30% of prostate cancers that will turn dangerous if not treated.

Chinnaiyan says he and Pinto had talked about collaborating in the past, but the grant program “was a catalyst to get us to do something, versus talking about it. We never really got to doing this seriously until we received this grant.”

In another project, Yang Liu, PhD, a cancer biologist and immunologist at Children's National Health System in Washington, DC, will be using a government-developed inhibitor to try to eliminate cancer stem cells from pediatric patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Current treatment helps nearly 90% of pediatric AML patients, but nearly half relapse within 2 years, and more than half of those patients die within a few years.

Liu wants to test an investigative drug called echinomycin, which inhibits hypoxia-inducible factor, believed to be a driver of AML stem cells. The NIH tested echinomycin in the 1990s, but couldn't measure its accumulation in tissue or blood and so couldn't tell if it targeted the tumor. Liu says he'd received small amounts of the drug previously, but he had no money to formulate it. Now, with the new grant and collaboration, he can test its pharmacokinetics in nonhuman primates and develop it into a form he can give to children with AML.

“Without the NIH, we wouldn't have the funds to formulate the drug in the form that we need,” Liu says.

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://CDnews.aacrjournals.org.