Immunotherapy is a new treatment that uses certain parts of a person’s immune system to fight cancer. It is now used in combination with chemotherapy to treat a specific group of women with triple negative breast cancer who have disease that has spread to multiple parts of their bodies and who are not candidates for surgery.
Very few African American women were enrolled on clinical trials of immunotherapy. Therefore, we do not know if immunotherapy will have the same results in African American women as it does in Caucasian women.
The aim of our study is to increase awareness and education in African American women on the use of immunotherapy in breast cancer and to increase enrollment of African American women in a specific clinical trial which will open at the Winship Cancer Institute and Grady Memorial Hospital studying the combination of radiation and immunotherapy in women with triple negative breast cancer. We will accomplish this through a social media campaign on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, patient educational pamphlets throughout Winship Cancer Institute and Grady Memorial Hospital and the support of an African American clinical research coordinator.
Through our program, we hope to increase the enrollment of African American women onto our immunotherapy clinical trial and answer important questions about the use of immunotherapy in African American women. If successful, the content we develop will set the stage for other educational material aimed at increasing African Americans enrollment on trials of immunotherapy regardless of disease site.
Peritoneal carcinomatosis (PC) — an aggressive metastasis of gastric cancer — is always fatal.
Approximately 20 percent of patients newly diagnosed with gastric cancer already have PC; and about 45 percent of those diagnosed will eventually develop PC. Researchers have a poor understanding of gastric cancer cells that populate the peritoneal cavity. Current therapies offer little help and research is limited. The lack of understanding of PC puts clinicians at a disadvantage when determining the best strategies for patients with this disease.
Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center are overcoming these obstacles through the Intraperitoneal Program. This program, which is led by Jaffer Ajani, M.D., professor of Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology at MD Anderson, is aiming to conduct high-quality multiplex profiling of PC cells and stroma (surrounding tissue). The program allows Dr. Ajani and his team to generate multiplex data for a large number of samples from patients and use innovative tools that, he believes, will result in transformative ways this disease is treated.
To carry out this research, Dr. Ajani’s team has already collected abdominal fluid from many patients with intraperitoneal metastases. From these samples, they have identified cancer stem cells, which they believe are responsible for spreading into the peritoneal cavity. Eventually, Dr. Ajani’s team aims to develop a deeper understanding of the immune biology of the peritoneal cavity and how cancer stem cells recruit normal cells to be protected from the immune system.
Too many lives have been lost to this cancer. In order to develop therapies that can be tested in preclinical models, researchers need to conduct a deep dive investigation into PC using multidimensional integrative analyses to comprehensively profile the tumor and its microenvironment. The goal of this work is to discover therapeutic targets, biomarkers and signatures with prognostic and predictive potentials, enabling us to build illuminating predictive models. The researchers’ ultimate mission is to use every resource available to find viable therapies to fight this terrible disease.
The healthcare landscape has dramatically changed in South Florida, and we welcome you to be a partner in this transformation. Miami Cancer Institute at Baptist Health South Florida opened its doors in 2016 and is now seeing nearly 1,200 patients per day. The Institute, supported by a clinical and research alliance with Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the leading academic cancer centers in the world, grants our patients access to the most advanced clinical trials for breast cancer. Patient accrual remains a huge challenge in clinical research, and the grant will go towards supporting recruitment for the important studies which in many cases, may give patients access to new therapies that are not yet readily available. The Institute will be proactive with the creation of recruitment materials as part of a well-coordinated campaign to address all aspects of enrollment as well as presenting information in an easy to understand and honest way including translation of all materials into Spanish. It is our goal to track enrollment efforts and adjust accordingly to what works best for our patient base and the community we serve. The mission of the breast clinical trial enrollment program is to provide innovative, patient centered cancer care through access to cutting edge treatments.
The goals of “precision medicine” in cancer are (1) to identify the molecules that drive the cancer and (2) develop “smart drugs” that block these drivers. These “smart drugs” should stop the cancer but not be toxic. Many “smart drugs” have been developed, but the cancer cells adapt and find escape routes. We get many hopeful “responses” to therapy but disappointingly few “cures.” Our research identifies escape routes that cancer cells use to evade death, and then uses additional drugs to block the escape from treatment.
Our approach is already showing success in treating a blood cancer called Mantle Cell Lymphoma. One of our combinations is causing complete responses in over half the patients we treat. Unfortunately, many cases show resistance to our drugs, even though the patients had never previously seen them. We are researching the ways that cancer cells become resistant to these powerful drug combinations. Our goal is to achieve deeper responses to therapy and turn the frequent “responses” into genuine “cures.”
Only a small percentage of patients with cancer in the US enroll on to clinical trials. This is creating a bottleneck for the development of new treatments. Efforts to improve how patients are identified for clinical trials are important to overcome this problem. One such effort which is showing promise is to use an individual known as a “pre-screener” to aid the clinical team in identifying eligible patients. The pre-screener functions as an extra set of eyes to review information generated from our electronic medical record as their records come in from referring physicians. They will be trained to look for patients meeting certain eligibility criteria and then notify the clinical team about the matches ahead of their visit. This will allow the team to better prepare and notify the coordinator for the study to be available at that time. The pre-screener will also serve as a resource for patients using our clinical trial education center in the clinic waiting area to help them navigate through the available information to identify a potential trial option to discuss with their physician during their visit.
Cancer involving the lining of the uterus is known as endometrial cancer. Endometrial cancer is a common female cancer with about 61,880 new cases per year. When this cancer has spread beyond the uterus, most women will die of their disease. Endometrial cancer deaths have been increasing each year since 2006. We need better and more treatments for this disease. There are tests to identify abnormal genes and proteins on the cancer cells. More research is needed to see if these abnormal genes and proteins can be used to make treatment decisions. We believe that survival for women with endometrial cancer that has spread outside of the uterus will be improved by using the abnormal tumor genes and proteins to find treatments that will work better. Our goal is to look more closely at these abnormal genes and proteins in cancer cells and determine if this new way to make treatment decisions and find better treatments will help women live longer. We also plan to find new drugs to treat this disease. We will bring together a group of medical centers, experts who treat women with this disease, patients, and patient advocates to help guide our study.
Precision cancer medicine refers to the tailoring and targeting of cancer treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient. Triple negative breast cancers (TNBC), specific types of breast cancer, are known to be very aggressive and tend to occur more frequently in Hispanic than non-Hispanic white patients. A team of researchers at the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center was formed to investigate the development of treatments that will target TNBC. This research will include the setup of clinical trials–research studies that test how well certain treatments work in patients with cancer. It is well known that there are obstacles that prohibit racial/ethnic minorities from participating in clinical trials. These include a variety of factors related to the patient, his/her provider, and the health system where he/she receives medical care. The goal of this application is to leverage work in a precision medicine project to engage with community partners on the topic of clinical trial accrual. This will be accomplished by addressing the following specific aims, focusing on Hispanic communities in San Diego and Imperial counties: 1) Assess the unique community perspective and experience of Hispanic breast cancer patients related to clinical trials; and 2) Educate community partners in precision medicine, clinical trials, patient perspective and experience, and the importance of minority representation in research. The proposed work will be conducted under the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center’s Community Outreach and Engagement, led by an expert team of investigators, physicians, and disparities researchers and staff.
While breast cancer in the United States is highest in white women, the mortality and incidence of more virulent forms of cancer are higher in black women. An under- representation of black women in clinical trials prevents a full understanding of how new drugs will potentially affect them and limits our effectiveness in treating future black women with breast cancer. The purpose of this research is to identify the specific reasons for low enrollment of black women in breast cancer trials in southeast Louisiana and develop means of addressing the barriers to participation.
Hormone therapy medicine helps lower the chance of breast cancer growing or coming back. African American breast cancer survivors say they lack information about hormone therapy. Women also say that side effects are a main reason for stopping hormone therapy. We are doing a study that will test a text message program for these women. Women who join the study will be randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group will get text messages and the other will not. The text messages have information to help women deal with side effects. We think the women getting texts will have fewer side effects and greater belief they can manage hormone therapy. We also think they will understand why hormone therapy is important. We think this will help women worry less about hormone therapy and continue taking it. With the V-Foundation funding, our main goal is to increase the number of women who join the study. We will use our current partnership with community members and social media to recruit more women. This is the first study to test a text message program for African American women on hormone therapy. It is also one of the first to use a community partnership and social media to recruit women.
This project aims to improve the enrollment of men with prostate cancer into studies that require specific changes in DNA in order to be eligible. The largest barrier to enrolling patients is obtaining information about their DNA. Current standards of practice do not have clear recommendations on when to test the DNA of men with prostate cancer. Insurance does not always cover the DNA testing needed to get this information. The University of Virginia has two research programs open that obtain DNA testing on men with prostate cancer. This grant will support the efforts of the Clinical Research Outreach Program at UVA to recruit men with prostate cancer into these research programs in order to obtain DNA testing on a greater number of men with prostate cancer.
