Targeting new cancer treatment

Mathis Winkler

Growing up on a farm in India, Rathinam Selvan learned about the

importance of tending to a crop.

Selvan’s family had to check in on rice fields every day to ensure

they were covered with water.

“If you don’t go every day, you’re going to lose a crop,” he said.

Working as a senior scientist halfway across the globe in a cell

biology laboratory at Hoag Cancer Center, Selvan still has to think like

a farmer in many ways.

Except now he’s intentionally feeding a nutrient mixture to something

that most people would rather see extinguished for good: tumor cells.

For the past year, Selvan has been working on an unusual clinical

trial that attempts to vaccinate people against their own cancer.

Called dendritic cell therapy, the process combines a patient’s own

tumor cells with dendritic cells, which help the body’s immune system

destroy harmful organisms.

Because cancer cells are generated inside the body and look similar to

healthy cells, the dendritic cells need help to detect them.

That’s why Selvan has to grow purified cells from the patient’s own

tumor outside the body and feed them directly to a supply of dendritic

cells.

The latter, in turn, then recognize cancer cells as harmful and help

to destroy them inside the patient’s body once they’ve been injected as a

vaccine.

Patric Schiltz, another senior scientist at the lab who is responsible

for harvesting dendritic cells from patients’ blood, said the trial

allows Hoag to offer patients more than just standard cancer treatments,

such as radiation and chemotherapy.

“The fact of the matter is, almost half of [adults with cancer] are

being treated with something that does not help them,” he said. “The

toolbox is limited.”

So far, four patients have received vaccine injections, and Hoag

officials said they hope to expand the program in the future.

“We’re still pretty early on in terms of the number of patients,” said

Robert O. Dillman, who works as the cancer center’s medical director and

oversees the trial.

While one patient’s immune system has already begun to battle the

cancer, Dillman added that he and his team will have to treat many more

people before they can draw any conclusions about the trial’s success.

But so far, flu-like symptoms are the vaccine’s only side effect,

giving Schiltz and his colleagues hope for future breakthroughs.

“Could you vaccinate against cancer?” Schiltz asked himself. “We think

the answer is probably yes.”

The vaccine program at Hoag, however, will only work for one patient

at a time because both cancer and dendritic cells have to come from the

patient that’s receiving the treatment.

“Cancer is not the same in every patient,” Schiltz said. “And yet we

want to treat patients with the same therapy. And that doesn’t make

sense. We need an individually tailored treatment for everyone.”

Hoag scientists are focusing on skin and kidney tumors at the moment,

but others could be included in the program later on, Dillman said.

But the Federal Drug Administration must approve the trials for each

kind of cancer, and money will also be a determining factor, he added.

-- Mathis Winkler covers Newport Beach. He may be reached at (949)

574-4232 or by e-mail at o7 mathis.winkler@latimes.comf7 .