News and Information
Centerpoint Spring 2008 (PDF)
Discovery to Cure: Striving to Achieve New Breakthroughs
The Discovery to Cure Program has already achieved great success through the research leadership of Gil Mor, MD, PhD, with new early detection testing and innovative treatment options available for ovarian cancer. To build on its accomplishments, the program recently recruited Alessandro Santin, MD, a successful clinician and researcher in gynecologic oncology from the University of Arkansas to join Dr. Mor. While at the University of Arkansas, Dr. Santin worked on developing a therapeutic vaccine for the treatment of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) infected cervical cancer. At Yale, he plans to expand this therapy to treat ovarian cancer, while continuing his research to develop other ground-breaking cancer vaccines.
The therapy Dr. Santin developed for cervical cancer works by using powerful stimulator cells, known as dendritic cells, to activate a patient’s own immune system against viral proteins expressed in the tumor cells while sparing the healthy cells. Dendritic cells, the “sentinels” of the immune system, are the most potent antigen presenting cell in our body. “With this therapy we are able to load the dendritic cells outside the body with fragments of one of the viral proteins present in the tumor of the patient,” Santin said. When they are fully mature, they are then injected back into the patient to warn the lymphocytes in the blood stream, which seek and destroy cells with the identical antigen. They alert the body to danger and to activate the immune system to recognize and kill the tumor.
Dr. Mor is excited to begin work with Dr. Santin. Dr. Mor and his team have recently developed a blood test for the early detection of ovarian cancer that has 99.4% accuracy. This means fewer false positives and false negatives for women, which is a huge accomplishment. “With this blood test we are able to detect a tumor earlier by monitoring changes in the body that occur due to the development of the tumor,” Mor explained. “We hope that this will soon become a routine test for women in the early detection of ovarian cancer and significantly decrease the high death rate of ovarian cancer.” When ovarian cancer is caught in its early stage, it is easier to treat and manage. Up until now, there were no sure methods for detecting ovarian cancer until it had progressed, making it the leading cause of gynecologic cancer deaths in the United States and three times more lethal than breast cancer.
The Discovery to Cure Program at Yale seeks to achieve accurate detection of ovarian and other reproductive cancers at their earliest stages while offering women at increased risk for cancer with high quality, compassionate clinical care. “There has always been a fantastic gap between the clinic and the lab. Now, with a patient’s consent, we are able to work directly with the patient and collect samples that are useful to us in the research lab. This makes it easier and quicker to get new developments out to benefit all patients,” Mor said.
Dr. Santin plans to work with the Discovery to Cure Program on a new study he calls, “genetic fingerprinting for ovarian cancer.” Dr. Santin recently received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for this very important and exciting new study looking at ways to develop an effective therapy against chemo-resistant/recurrent ovarian cancer. “Although many patients with advanced stage disease initially respond to standard therapy, nearly 90% develop recurrence and the tumor eventually becomes chemotherapy-resistant,” Santin explained. His team has discovered genes that encode for receptors highly expressed in chemo-resistant/recurrent ovarian cancers that may render these tumors highly sensitive to killing by a bacterial toxin. This discovery has the potential to rapidly evolve into a highly effective strategy for the treatment of ovarian cancer that is resistant to chemotherapy, and may possibly work for other human tumors as well.
Dr. Santin and Dr. Mor are part of a multidisciplinary team at Yale dedicated to discovering new ways to detect, treat, and cure gynecologic cancers. Working together with the clinicians, they are able to bring new research discoveries to patients much quicker than before. With a blood test that is 99.4% effective in detecting ovarian cancer at its earliest stage and the therapeutic vaccines that Dr. Santin is developing, women diagnosed with a gynecologic have new hope with the help of the Discovery to Cure Program.
