UCLA researchers identify possible approach to prevent cancer from evolving to resist treatment
Source: News Wise, January 2023
Newswise — A new clinical and preclinical study from UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center identifies the DNA roots of resistance to targeted cancer therapy, providing a possible strategy to address a vexing issue in cancer therapeutics. Results are published online ahead of print in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
“We are taking a fresh approach to combat ‘acquired therapy resistance’ – the ability of cancers to escape targeted treatments by undergoing molecular evolution. Intensive research has focused on treatment of cancers that have relapsed, seeking to intervene after the tumor cells have become more complicated and stronger. We thought that preventing, rather than trying to reverse resistance after the cancer has become more aggressive, may improve our patients’ odds of survival,” said co-senior author Dr. Roger Lo, a UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center researcher and a professor of medicine and molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
To understand how the cancer genome changes immediately after the initiation of targeted therapy – potentially generating new genetic variants capable of escaping the therapy – the researchers focused on metastatic cutaneous melanoma. This aggressive skin cancer had no effective treatment until the recent development of a targeted therapy for patients whose cancers harbor a BRAF gene mutation – found in about half of metastatic melanoma patients and in patients with many other types of common and highly lethal cancers.