ASU leads new efforts in cancer treatments

Every year, about 2 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer, and more than 600,000 of them have cancer that spreads or no longer responds to treatment because of cancer cell mutations.

Researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) aim to solve this by making cancer care more personal, helping doctors adapt treatments to how the disease changes over time for each patient.

Professor Ken Buetow, Director at the Center for Evolution and Medicine at ASU, joined “Arizona Horizon” to discuss their research program called “The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.”

“The purpose of this research program is to literally identify what is the underlying mechanisms that cause those, cause the cancer to be able to evade the treatments and then use those to have next generation targeted therapies,” Buetow said.

As cancer mutates, Buetow speaks to how this can be difficult to address through treatment.

“That’s part of the challenge that we face is that, is that the cancer itself is rapidly changing all the time in response to the body’s attempt to fight it. As well as whatever we do in treatments, and what we’re really attempting to do here is essentially embrace the Wayne Gretzky strategy of cancer therapy. So rather than treating the cancer we see today, what we want to do is characterize the tumor and then evaluate where we think the tumor is going and use that as our tools to direct our next therapies,” Buetow said.

ASU is working with other institutions across the country. The research that is specifically being done at ASU is centered around computer modeling.

“Our goal in the ASU funded portion of this program is to literally be the group that identifies how is it that cancer is resisting the treatment. What are the specific molecular mechanisms that the cancer uses and we’re using state-of-the-art computational methods. We’re bringing to bear all of the state-of-the-art genomics analysis, and of course machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches as well,” Buetow said.