Of all the 60 miles that the participants in the Susan G. Komen San Diego 3-Day walk this week, the ones that take them across the Torrey Pines Mesa may be the most significant—or at least the most symbolic.
The walk, which begins today, brings these dedicated supporters up a long hill from Del Mar, CA, into the heart of San Diego’s biomedical research hub. Sanford-Burnham alone has been the recipient of approximately $3 million in grants from Susan G. Komen for the Cure since 1982. Other research institutions in the area, including The Scripps Research Institute, the Salk Institute, and the University of California, San Diego, have likewise applied Komen funding toward a greater understanding of breast cancer and, ultimately, a cure. (Learn more about where Komen’s funding goes here.)
Dr. Tambet Teesalu, a researcher at Sanford-Burnham, is currently working on a Komen grant to pursue the next generation of tumor-penetrating peptides that target breast cancer. His team’s finding could mean safer, more effective treatments for breast cancer.
“Penetration of drugs through the walls of breast tumor blood vessels and into the cancerous tissue remains an unsolved research goal,” Dr. Teesalu explains. “As a result, malignant cells in breast and other solid tumors are exposed to drug levels that are insufficient for their eradication. To overcome the tumor drug penetration problem, drugs must be used at high concentration, leading to serious side effects.”
Dr. Teesalu, together with Dr. Kazuki N. Sugahara in the laboratory of Dr. Erkki Ruoslahti, discovered a family of tumor-targeting peptides (short proteins) that are bifunctional: they both target tumor blood vessels and then exit the vessels to reach tumor cells. They observed that their lead tumor-penetrating peptide, iRGD, increases tumor cell exposure to cancer drugs even when the peptides are simply co-injected with cancer drugs.
Dr. Teesalu says, “We hope that the improved tumor-penetrating peptides that we will develop will make it possible to deliver drugs to both fast- and slow-growing breast tumors at higher concentrations than permitted by standard therapies. As the peptide and the anti-cancer drug are not coupled to one another, validated and approved peptides that we will develop can be used to augment any cancer drug—potentially providing a major advance in breast cancer therapy.”
He expresses his gratitude, saying, “We are very grateful to Susan G. Komen for the Cure for their generous support and for recognizing the potential value of our work. The funding will provide critical resources to develop tumor-penetrating peptides that are specifically tailored to target breast cancer lesions—work that we could otherwise not carry out.”
Here at Sanford-Burnham, we are inspired to see the walkers pass by, while the research they’re walking for is going on right inside our walls. We thank the participants in the San Diego 3-Day and wish them all the best. Follow their journey on the Komen for the Cure’s “living map.”