Cancer Team Awarded Grant to Study Mutation Panel for Personalized Therapy

A team led by Scott Langevin, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health and a member of both the UC Cancer Institute and Cincinnati Cancer Center, was awarded a $146,693 grant from the Elsa U. Pardee Foundation to apply a custom mutation sequencing panel to biopsies from head and neck cancer patients who were treated without surgery. The research is being done to hopefully identify mutations that can predict how patients will respond to certain therapies, leading to personalized treatment plans.

"There were an estimated 55,070 new cases of head and neck cancer in the U.S. in 2014, and the outcomes for this type of cancer are relatively poor, with an overall five-year survival around 60 percent," says Langevin. "Chemotherapy and radiation without surgery are increasingly being used as a first approach for patients with advanced throat cancers in an effort to preserve the healthy tissues. However, not all patients will respond well to their treatment. In this study, we will apply a custom Next Generation sequencing panel, which we put together based on key mutations that arise in head and neck cancer, to pretreatment biopsy tissues obtained from patients treated with chemoradiation to identify biomarkers for predicting outcomes. 

"If this is successful, this tool could help drive personalized medicine by allowing clinicians to improve treatment strategies and improve overall patient outcomes."

Other members of his team include Trisha Wise-Draper, MD, PhD, Division of Hematology Oncology; Randall Butler, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine; and Xiang Zhang, PhD, and Liang Niu, both from the Department of Environmental Health. All investigators are also members of the CCC and the Environmental Health Center for Environmental Genetics.

Shuk-mei Ho, PhD, director of the CCC and Jacob G. Schmidlapp Professor and Chair of Environmental Health, says grants like this are important for researchers like Zhang and Niu who are junior faculty members.

"These young faculty members are our future," she says.

"This project will help me gain experience in head and neck cancer research," adds Niu, who is the bioinformatician for the project.

The Elsa U. Pardee Foundation was established in the name of Mrs. Elsa U. Pardee, who died from cancer in 1944. Pardee provided a $1 million trust fund "for the promotion of the control and cure of cancer" and asked that this fund be used to support research in the field of cancer and to provide for others the advantages of new knowledge and techniques for the treatment of this related group of diseases.