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Angiogenesis research points to new cures

by Lynne Langley
Of The Post and Courier Staff 
New cancer treatments that cause few, if any side effects are helping patients after more toxic cancer cures failed.   Still experimental, some of the pills and injections could reach the market soon, just ahead of related medicines to stop conditions that cause blindness, arthritis and other ills.

Harvard scientist Dr. Judah Folkman, the man whose discoveries made such treatments possible, has devoted more than 40 years to exploring angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels that feed cancer, and then to inhibiting that vessel growth and so starving tumors. 

Folkman, featured in a Nova program last year entitled “Cancer Warrior,” came to Charleston Thursday to present a standing-room-only lecture to more than 300 at the Medical University of South Carolina and  to meet with students and faculty who focus on angiogenesis. 

World-renowned cancer specialist Dr. Judah Folkman was honored as a Lindbergh-Carrel Prize Laureate during the Sept. 5 Charles A. Lindbergh symposium at MUSC. Dr. Folkman, who spoke about his lifetime work on angiogenesis research, is joined by MUSC’s Drs. Ken Roozen, executive director of the Foundation for Research Development; Yusuf Hannun, deputy director for research at Hollings Cancer Center; and Lindbergh symposium coordinator Vladimir Mironov, visiting assistant professor with the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy.

Folkman's work is so important that he is likely to receive a Nobel Prize in the not too distant future, said Dr. Kenneth J. Roozen, MUSC Foundation for Research Development executive director.

“It's a very exciting time,” said Folkman, whose theory and work met with intense skepticism at first.

Now about 40 scientific papers on angiogenesis are published each week as scientists around the world explore different aspects of blood vessel formation, ways to block it and the impact of vessel growth on different kinds of disease.

Patients are taking at least 24 different experimental cancer drugs at some 200 medical centers, Folkman said. One company expects to complete two trials early next year and announced it hopes to have the first angiogenesis blocker on the market soon. Folkman has seen the results as tumors, undaunted by highly toxic treatments, stop growing in patients who walk into the hospital after shopping for their treatments.

Some scientists now speak of turning cancer into a manageable disease with which people will live rather than die. Cancer patients may have to take a pill or a shot each day for the rest of their lives, but so do diabetics, Folkman pointed out. Folkman said he expects a single drug will work against all kinds of cancer.

If you drain the Pacific, said Folkman, you shouldn't be surprised to see all the islands are connected. In this case all cancers also join some major causes of blindness, rheumatoid arthritis and endometriosis—all caused by blood vessels that extend where they should not have grown.

Folkman suspected that a protein, one of thousands in the human body, causes angiogenesis. The search took him 10 years. Still more work was required to discover an extract and finally a single molecule that inhibited that protein and vessel growth.

Now his laboratory investigates what switches on angiogensis and what turns it off.

More than 30 percent of women older than 40, when autopsied, have breast cancers the size of a pencil tip that neither grow nor die but never harm the woman, Folkman has found. Only one in 100 such women develops breast cancer, just as prostate cancer expands in only one of 100 men who have pinprick-sized prostate cancers. If Folkman can find out what prevents those tiny cancers from calling in blood vessels, and the gene responsible, he foresees the potential to prevent cancer in patients at risk.

Folkman's newest research paper, published last week, explored endothelial cells that line blood vessels and their control over tissue mass. The ramifications include healing hearts after heart attacks and brains after strokes, he said. The cells even control fat: Turn them off and a mouse can eat day and night without putting on weight.

Dr. Jian-Xing Ma, MUSC associate professor of ophthalmology, battles diabetic retinopathy, in which abnormal blood vessels reduce vision or blind 15 percent of diabetics.

Ma and his colleagues have stopped the progression of vessels and prevented new vessels from forming in the eyes of rodents with retinopathy by injecting a peptide, a fragment of a protein. Ma's paper a year ago was the first in the world to show the level of peptide in the eye is a cause of blood vessel growth and, more recently a paper showing that the peptide stops vessel growth.

“It's very promising,” said Ma, who hopes to begin clinical trials in four or five years and who discussed his work with Folkman Thursday.

Five companies that are developing anti-angiogenesis cancer drugs have begun making very similar drugs that are in final human trials to treat macular degeneration, which affects 11 million Americans and relentlessly causes blindness, Folkman said. So far, four stop vision loss while the fifth, as reported a month ago, brings back lost vision.

“It's going like lightning,” Folkman said, adding that some of the drugs are close to approval.
Editor's note: The above is an article that ran Sept. 6 in the Post and Courier and is printed with permission. 
 

MUSC researchers receive patents

Twenty-eight researchers were recognized Thursday prior to the MUSC Foundation for Research Development Biomedical Innovation Lecture for having been issued patents as a result of their work at MUSC.

“Each inventor was awarded a plaque representing his or her contribution to an issued patent,” said Pearce Gilbert, program manager for technology transfer at MUSC’s Foundation for Research Development. He explained that a patent can take from two to three years to issue.  As executive director Ken Roozen pointed out upon presenting the plaques, several of these inventions already have been licensed to industry, and one of them represents MUSC’s first $1 million license deal.

“We pursue patents when we feel there is substantial commercial opportunity,” Gilbert said.

MUSC’s policy for distribution of patent revenues is stated in the MUSC Faculty Handbook.

Receiving plaques were: Yuehuei An, Paul L. Baron, Julie Chao, Lee Chao, David J. Cole, Thomas A. Dix, Joseph Dolan, Jian-yun Dong, Sebastiano Gattoni-Celli, Brian Hoel, Joseph A. Horton, Ayad A. Jaffa, Harry S. Margolius, Vladimir Mironov, Thomas A. Mortinelli, Danforth Newton, James Norris, Paul H. O’Brien, Takis S. Papas, Philip J. Privitera, Michael Schmidt, David Schofield, Christian Schwabe, Qing Song, Diana Joan Vincent, John N. Vournakis, Jerry Webb, and Caroline Westwater.
 

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