DAYTON, OHIO (WDTN) – A study led by Dr. John Kopchick and his graduate student, Dr. Arshad Ahmad, found a potential new way to treat cancer.
This study focused on the deadliest cancer, lung cancer, specifically non-small cell lung cancer. Using large patient databases, they were able to identify that there was a trend between Growth Hormone Receptor Levels and the length of life after diagnosis.Dr. Arshad Ahmad, Postdoctoral researcher for Dr. John Kopchick, said, “We got the patient data where we found that the patient who has a high growth hormone receptor level, they had a survival of two years less than the patient who has a low growth hormone receptor tumor.”Kopchick discovered the drug Pegvisomant in 1987, and it is FDA-approved to treat people who have high levels of growth hormones.Dr. John Kopchick, Ohio University Distinguished Professor of molecular biology, said, “Growth hormone promotes cellular growth. Cancer is abnormal cell growth. So we thought that, or we hypothesized, could our drug be used to inhibit some of these solid tumors?”“It (Pegvisomant) will bind to the growth hormone receptor in the cancer tumor, and we wanted to see if it would decrease the size of whatever would happen to the tumor.”The team found that growth hormones actually made cancer cells more resistant to chemotherapy, pushing the drugs out of the cancer cells.“What we found in our lab is that the main culprit, which drives the therapy resistance in different cancers, not only the lung cancer, is actually the growth hormone action and what growth hormone action is doing. So growth hormone action actually activates the drug efflux pump.”To perform this study, they injected mice with lung cancer cells and tested their theory. The results were positive, with some mice even cancer-free.“We put it in a mouse that will not reject it, and then treat it with chemotherapy and our drug. And that’s where we got phenomenal results in terms of the ability of a drug like this to enhance the activity of immunotherapy and chemotherapy.”The next step for the study is to collaborate with a company doing cancer research to go through the FDA process to test this treatment on humans…