Caring for Carcinoid NET cancer makes grants
The development of animal models for NET cancers over the last year has opened a number of research doors the Caring for Carcinoid Foundation wants to try to exploit. The foundation announced three grants last week totaling $1,050,000 all of which are involved with the mouse models.
The first, for $300,000 over two years, will fund work at Cold Spring Harbor Labs by Dr. David Tuveson to further develop mouse models toward identifying genes and pathways that cause neuroendocrine tumor formation following transposon-mediated mutagenesis in adult enterochromaffic cells. The idea seems to be to try to figure out what causes NET cancer cells to form and develop into tumors.
The second grant will go to C. David Allis, Ph.d., at Rockefeller University. He will use an animal model to work toward an understanding of the tumor suppression activities of ATRX and Daxx in pancreatic cells. The thinking is that when these stop doing their job NET cancers develop in the pancreas. Allis’s work will look into that aspect of the disease. The research may also reveal some things about how other cancers develop as well. Caring for Carcinoid’s grant is for $450,000 over two years.
The third piece of research Caring for Carcinoid will fund also deals with pancreatic cancer. It will use animal models to look at MEN1 and PTEN–as well as at Daxx and ATRX–in the development of pancreatic NET cancers. Dr Kwok-KIn Wong at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is the recipient of this $300,000 grant. The hope here is to develop a new line of drugs for treating pNETs.
All three grants will require refinements in the animal models that have been developed over the course of the last year. In the long-term, the development of the model means research on NET cancer should develop more quickly since previously all testing relied on human beings who had the disease.
National NET Cancer Patient Conference unveils major news
In a separate development, a new, more convenient test for 5-HIAA was unveiled at the 2012 National Carcinoid/Neuroendocrine Tumor (NET) Patient Conference in New Orleans last month. Dr. Eugene Woltering from the NET cancer program at Ochsner-Kenner and LSU in conjunction with the Interscience Institute has developed a less complicated test for the serotonin by-product. The test has been tried on 200 patients with what the press release terms “remarkable” results.
Until now, the only way to test for 5-HIAA was by collecting all of a patient’s urine for 24 hours following three days of avoiding certain kinds of foods that could skew the results.
The other major Ochsner-Kenner unveiling at the conference was a system of lymphatic mapping developed to instruct surgeons on just how much intestine they need to remove when going after NET cancers in the small bowel.
Details on both of these are sketchy at the moment. If anyone can get me a link to more information, please contact me at walkingwithjane@gmail.com.
The difficulty now will be getting the word out to physicians. Too often, patients are the means by which new knowledge about NET cancer reaches primary care physicians. This is something else we need to work on.
