A $710,000 four-year grant has been awarded to University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) to study the cause of why cancer spreads to the brain in some lung cancer patients.
The Department of Veterans Affairs provided the grant.
UNMC said lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality in the world, accounting for about 24 percent of cancer-related deaths in both women and men.
The redicted five-year survival rate of one type of lung cancer — non-small-cell lung cancer — is 21 percent, said Apar Ganti, MD, principal investigator of the study and oncologist specializing in lung cancer at UNMC and the Nebraska Western Iowa VA Medical Center in Omaha.
Once cancer has spread to the brain, the outcomes are poor as most chemotherapy drugs cannot penetrate into the brain in high enough concentrations to be effective, he said.
Researchers have identified a protein that may be adding to the spread of lung cancer to the brain.
“We have found that a mucin – a protein – mucin 5AC (MUC5AC) — is seen in high levels in the lung tumors of patients whose brain lesion has been removed due to spread. We believe that this protein somehow promotes the spread of cancer into the brain,” Dr. Ganti said. “If we are able to prove our hypotheses, we hope to be able to target this protein – mucin 5AC — and thereby potentially prevent the spread of lung cancer to the brain.”
UNMC mucins are major components in mucus that function as a physical barrier.
“We hope that we will be able to identify the pathways by which non-small cell lung cancer spreads to the brain. Since this is a very common site of spread of lung cancer, this will impact a large number of patients. If we can prove this, the next step will be to study patients with lung cancer and brain metastases,” Dr. Ganti said.
Dr. Ganti said the team will use lung cancer cells and lung cancer animal models to decrease the MUC5AC protein level and evaluate the spread of lung cancer to the brain. They also will try and identify other proteins that may act as intermediate steps in this process.
Dr. Ganti said they would also define the clinical utility of MUC5AC antibodies currently being developed at UNMC (Drs. Jain, Varshney and Kaur) on preventing/treating metastases in patients for the first time.
Collaborators on the projects include Mohd Wasim Nasser, PhD, Imayavaramban Lakshmanan, PhD and Surinder Batra, PhD, Maneesh Jain, PhD, Grish Varshney, PhD and Sukhwinder Kaur, PhD.