AACR Day 1
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) yearly meeting is happening in Chicago this week! Twenty thousand cancer researchers have gathered to discuss the latest cancer research findings, which will hopefully be translated into life-saving treatments for cancer patients. This year, for the first time, CoMMpass findings are featured in three reports at this meeting.
Day 1
Myeloma researchers at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University may have discovered a new drug target, named syntenin, for treatment of myeloma. Using the CoMMpass study dataset, they have shown that patients who have a higher amount of syntenin protein tend to have shorter progression free survival, in other words, they spend a shorter time in remission after starting a new treatment. In the laboratory, the researchers have found that
- Syntenin may help myeloma cells survive outside of the bone marrow, which can result in extramedullary disease
- Syntenin appears to allow myeloma cells to become resistant to common myeloma therapies
- If the researchers treat myeloma cells to decrease the amount of syntenin, the cells are once again sensitive to myeloma therapies
These laboratory findings need to be confirmed in the clinic. If researchers can find a new drug to decrease syntenin in patients, it may lengthen the time they are able to stay in remission and decrease the possibility that they will become resistant to therapy.
Making our CoMMpass data freely available to researchers all over the world encourages them to use it to make new discoveries about how myeloma cells work, which may then enable discovery of new myeloma treatments. As we continue to gather valuable patient data in CoMMpass until 2023, these new discoveries will continue to bring myeloma patients closer to a cure.
Stay tuned for more reports from AACR this week!
