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A UNM professor and her team are one step closer to finding a cure for cancer.
Angela Wandinger-Ness, a professor in the University’s Department of Pathology, and Laurie Hudson in the College of Pharmacy are working on a new approach to cure cancer. In November, Wandinger-Ness was one of nine women in New Mexico who won the 2012 Women in Technology Award from the New Mexico Technology Council after six years of work on her project.
Her research focuses on repurposing an FDA-approved drug normally used to treat pain to instead inhibit GTPases, which are enzymes that cause cancerous tumors when mutated or over-expressed.
“It’s like taking a monkey wrench and throwing it into the spokes of a wheel, and it causes the wheel to lock up,” Wandinger-Ness said. “We take a small drug … bind it to the (enzyme), and it freezes it and turns it off.”
Her efforts have earned UNM two grants, one from the Department of Defense and the other from the National Cancer Institute. Both grants fund efforts to refine Wandinger-Ness’s breakthrough.
Wandinger-Ness said her team chose ovarian cancer patients for their clinical trials, due to the extreme difficulty of diagnosing and treating that particular variety of cancer, and the specific role that GTPases play in causing ovarian tumors.
“By the time the patient comes in the clinic, they’re in a very advanced stage of the disease,” Wandinger-Ness said. “It’s a disease where you can really make a difference, if you can treat it better.”
Wandinger-Ness’s drug-based approach stands in contrast to the standard treatment for ovarian cancer, which is invasive surgery to remove pieces of the tumor, and follow-up chemotherapy treatments to destroy remaining cells. However, such broad-spectrum chemotherapy usually destroys healthy cells alongside cancerous cells.
“Our idea is to reduce the collateral damage that chemotherapy normally brings,” Wandinger-Ness said. “We would give the patient the drugs before surgery to specifically target GTPases. The idea is to keep the cancer cells from regrowing after surgery and make chemotherapy work better.”
Though the drug used has already been approved, Wandinger-Ness said wide distribution of the cancer treatment could be about five years away, because there is still one major challenge to figure out.
“There are two compounds in the drug … like a right hand and a left hand, and they both do different things,” she said. “What we would need to do first is purify the drug, and find the compound that targets GTPases specifically … and give that to the patients.”
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This treatment could also branch off into helping patients suffering from other cancers where GTPase switches are involved, such as colon cancer and breast cancer, she said.
Though the process was difficult, she said she never lost her motivation.
“It’s rewarding to take a discovery in the laboratory and take it all the way to a patient,” Wandinger-Ness said. “I love science, and I like to see it translate to something that can make a difference.”
