Stand Up To Cancer

In the run-up to the big show last week and in its aftermath, lots of news outlets stepped up to give the issues surrounding cancer proper context and attention. Below are several highlight passages from a piece in the latest edition of Time magazine by Bill Saporito, a cancer survivor himself. To read the entire article, pick up the September 15th issue of Time this week or click here.

"For an increasing number of cancer activists, researchers and patients, there is too much death and too much waiting for new drugs and therapies. They want a greater sense of urgency, a new approach that emphasizes translational research over basic research--turning knowledge into therapies and getting them to patients pronto. The problem is, that's not the way our sclerotic research paradigm--principally administered by the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute (NIH/NCI)--is set up. "The fact that we jump up and down when cancer deaths go from 562,000 to 561,000, that's ridiculous. That's not enough," says Lance Armstrong, 36, the cyclist and cancer survivor turned activist through his Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF).

"A new and more radical approach is being taken by groups like the newly formed Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C), which plans to finance research designed to deliver big leaps and home runs rather than the incremental improvements that are more typical of mainstream science. The new focus for funding grants, said Dr. Eric Winer, chief scientific adviser to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, in a conference address, is results: "What we want to see is research that is going to change the number of women that are diagnosed with, or more importantly, die of, breast cancer within the foreseeable future." Others, like the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF), are trying a no-nonsense business model to speed drug development.

"Doctors and scientists understand the frustration and the fear, and they don't necessarily mind the nudge. "We do need to change. Something needs to be done differently," says Tyler Jacks, director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. "We have a lot of new insight, and we need to have a whole new collection of drugs, a new armamentarium."

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"The New Paradigm

"These are precisely the kinds of challenges that gave rise to Stand Up to Cancer, the advocacy group organized by CBS newscaster Katie Couric and eight other women, all of them connected to Hollywood, including Spider-Man producer Laura Ziskin, who has breast cancer. Says Couric, who lost her husband and sister to cancer: "It was clear to me and other people that this borders on the ridiculous. You ask yourself: What can be done?" SU2C has a scheduled Sept. 5 launch with an unprecedented three-network simulcast, hosted by Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson. It features a roster of stars, including a performance by cancer survivor Melissa Etheridge and a film by Errol Morris (who produced Standard Operating Procedure, an acclaimed documentary about Abu Ghraib abuses). "I will make you laugh," says Ziskin, who produced the show. "I will definitely make you cry." But so, too, would any name-your-disease telethon.

"It's what happens next that is different. SU2C will not distribute funds to research institutions. Instead, it will assemble dream teams of scientists across disciplines and institutions, and they will work collaboratively on projects designed to deliver a product of sorts--as opposed to an academic paper--within a defined time period. Says Ziskin: "They can only get funded if they can produce a treatment."

"To vet and choose the projects, SU2C has recruited a high-powered scientific advisory committee chaired by Phillip Sharp, a Nobel Prize--winning cancer researcher at MIT. The selected projects will then be monitored by the American Association for Cancer Research. "What I hope to do is identify areas where we could accelerate progress, particularly in areas where there's need--ovarian, pancreatic, glioblastoma," says Sharp.

"Additionally, 20% of the funds raised will go to higher-risk projects with potentially greater paybacks. It's a science version of throwing it long. "If you run the same play every time, you're not going to win the game," says Armstrong. One of SU2C's advisers was the late Judah Folkman, a famed cancer scientist whose pathbreaking theory that tumors grow via angiogenesis (creating their own blood supply) was resisted for decades. "There may be other Judah Folkmans out there," says Ziskin. "We don't want them wandering around for 40 years."

"SU2C is not the only independent group shaking things up. The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation used a pay-for-results funding model that has more to do with Silicon Valley than Big Pharma to support research that in four years got four new treatments to patients--Thalomid, Velcade, Revlimid and Doxil. That's about six years faster than the decade it usually takes for such drug development and rollout. Multiple myeloma is a rare cancer of the bone marrow that sickens about 20,000 Americans each year--precisely the uncommon form of the disease that often falls into the research cracks. The MMRF benefited from the aggressive work of founder Kathy Giusti, a multiple-myeloma survivor and former pharmaceutical executive. When she and her group first raised enough money to start funding research, she faced a feeding frenzy of research applicants. "They will do what they have to do to get grant money. They're desperate," she says.

"The MMRF made sure it got the most from its grant dollars by adopting an enforced-collaboration model in 2004, linking work at four cancer centers into a consortium managed by PricewaterhouseCoopers and providing them all with patients, tissue samples and a set of targets and goals. "The odds of a cure coming from one center are nil," Giusti says. "You need a mutual fund to fight cancer." From not having a single drug in the pipeline, the MMRF now has 30, half of them in clinical trials. The average lifespan of a multiple-myeloma patient has been extended by three years, to seven.

"If the MMRF model works for a single, specialized cancer, it's not clear that a group like Stand Up to Cancer--which is casting a far wider research net--will show the same results. But clinicians say it's worth trying. "There needs to be a mechanism whereby we can bring groups of people together from different institutions in one group," says DuBois, who is part of SU2C's scientific panel. At the same time, there is hope that the 20% of grants SU2C is setting aside for outside-the-box research will yield something semimiraculous."

To read this article in it's entirety, go to:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1838776,00.html