The new drug, Rasonque, made a splash in recent media when the FDA approved it to extend the lives of patients with pancreatic cancer—a notoriously difficult type of cancer to treat. New treatments can only reach patients through years of early lab studies and discoveries, such as a new gene that may be a potential drug target, recently identified by researchers in the Leach Laboratory at Dartmouth Cancer Center.
The newly published research, led by Professor Steven D. Leach, MD, Senior Research Scientist Britton C. Goodale, PhD, and postdoctoral research fellow Somer M. Matar, PhD, identified a gene called HDAC9 that appears to create a pathway that helps pancreatic cancer cells lose their normal identity and become more aggressive.
In zebrafish models of human cancer, which strongly correlate with human disease and can be invaluable for identifying new therapeutic targets, the team found that blocking this pathway can push affected cells back toward a more normal, differentiated state.
“Our study uniquely integrated data from human pancreatic cancer with data generated by zebrafish and mouse pancreatic cancer models to identify new targets for therapy,” says Leach.
The team’s next steps include a preclinical trial and a Phase I trial of a class of inhibitors known to disrupt HDAC enzymes in mouse and human pancreatic cancer, to see if the inhibitors might also work against the newly discovered HDAC9 activity.
“If successful, this research opens the door for epigenetic treatment of pancreatic cancer,” notes Leach.