Sanford-Burnham’s president, Kristiina Vuori, M.D., Ph.D., was named today as part of a new “Dream Team” to find innovative new ways to fight melanoma using a personalized medicine approach.
The Dream Team researchers will receive three years of funding from Stand Up To Cancer and the Melanoma Research Alliance. The newly funded project, which will receive a grant of $6 million, will not only explore a personalized medicine approach to treating metastatic melanoma, but may also lay the groundwork for fighting many other tumor and disease types. Stand Up To Cancer is a program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a charitable organization that has raised more than $100 million for cancer research in the past two years, much of it in connection with nationally televised fundraising specials.
“This is a test case to determine whether personalized medicine can become a reality. It’s our hope to be able to treat a patient with melanoma based on that person’s own molecular profile—an approach that’s likely to be more effective and have fewer side effects than current treatments,” said Vuori, who also directs Sanford-Burnham’s National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center. “Most importantly, our approach may represent improved survival for this patient group that currently has limited treatment options.”
Approximately half of all patients with metastatic melanoma have a cancer-causing mutation in a gene called BRAF, while the other half of patients have the normal, mutation-free version of the gene, known as BRAFwt. This Dream Team will be developing new treatments for patients with BRAFwt melanoma.
To do this, team members will compare BRAFwt and BRAF-mutant cells at the molecular level. Then, Vuori’s group at Sanford-Burnham will compare their sensitivities to a carefully selected collection of chemical compounds that are already in the pharmaceutical pipeline—compounds that have the potential to become new melanoma medicines in a relatively short period of time. Other team members at Scripps Health and The Scripps Research Institute will use statistical methods to match anomalies in tumors with individual drugs’ effectiveness against them.
All this information will inform clinical trials that will determine whether this personalized approach significantly improves clinical outcomes for patients with melanoma. According to the National Cancer Institute, one out of 51 people will be diagnosed with melanoma of the skin during their lifetime. One person dies from melanoma every hour in the United States.
The new Dream Team—Stand Up To Cancer’s sixth Dream Team, the first to target melanoma, and the first to partner with another foundation, the Melanoma Research Alliance—is led by researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, Michigan. In addition to Sanford-Burnham, Scripps Research, and Scripps Health, the team also includes members from the Mayo Clinic, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Van Andel Research Institute, and The Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University.
Team advocates include Mark Gorman, J.D., National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship; Derrick Hall, president of the Arizona Diamondbacks; Connie Mack, U.S. Senator, Ret.; and Jane Perlmutter, Ph.D., Gemini Group. Stand Up to Cancer’s scientific partner is the American Association for Cancer Research.
To learn more about melanoma, visit the National Cancer Institute.
Congratulations Dr. Vuori and Stand up to Cancer!